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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Maanvi Singh , Lauren Aratani, Joan E Greve, Martin Belam and Tom McCarthy

Voter participation poised to soar as more than 70m vote early – as it happened

People wait in line to cast their ballots at an early voting location in Georgia.
People wait in line to cast their ballots at an early voting location in Georgia. Photograph: Elijah Nouvelage/AFP/Getty Images

Summary

  • As of this evening, 70,032,485 Americans have already voted early – either in person or absentee, according to the US Elections Project.The overwhelming enthusiasm has perhaps put this year on pace to see some of the highest voter participation rates in more than a century.
  • Hundreds took to the streets in Philadelphia to protest the police killing of Walter Wallace Jr, a 27-year-old Black man. Philadelphia police said they will be deploying more officers and have asked for the National Guard to assist them as protests continue.
  • Amy Coney Barrett officially joined the supreme court, after Chief Justice John Roberts delivered her judicial oath in a private ceremony this morning.
  • Trump lashed out against Barack Obama as the former president unleashed blistering criticism of his successor. Speaking at a drive-in rally in Orlando, Florida, Obama once again lambasted Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, noting the president has complained about the news coverage the pandemic has received as the US death toll continues to climb. “He’s jealous of Covid’s media coverage,” Obama said.
  • Biden delivered a speech in Warm Springs, Georgia, as polls show a close presidential race in the traditionally conservative state. “The president declared, he’s going to wage war on the virus. Instead he shrugged, swaggered and he surrendered,” Biden said in Warm Springs. “Well, I’m here to tell you we can and will get control of this virus.”
  • Trump falsely suggested it was illegal to count ballots after election day. “It would be very, very proper and very nice if a winner were declared on November 3, instead of counting ballots for two weeks, which is totally inappropriate, and I don’t believe that’s by our laws,” Trump told reporters before leaving Washington for his three campaign rallies today. In reality, states have until 8 December (known as the “safe harbor” deadline) to tabulate final election results.
  • A federal judge denied the justice department’s bid to take over Trump’s defense in E Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit. The judge ruled that the president was not acting in his official capacity when he denied Carroll’s rape allegation, as the justice department had argued.

My colleague Tom McCarthy will continue to bring you live updates. Follow along here:

Trump administration sets new low for refugee admissions

In a late-night press release, the White House announced it will admit no more than 15,000 refugees over the next fiscal year, setting a historic low since the US began its refugee program in 1980.

“This refugee admissions ceiling incorporates more than 6,000 unused places from the FY 2020 refugee admissions ceiling that might have been used if not for the COVID-19 pandemic,” the administration said in a statement.

Last year, the administration set the cap for the number of refugees admitted into the US at 18,000. The year before that it was 30,000. The caps have a significant reduction from the 110,000 refugees allowed during Barack Obama’s last year in office.

The determination to cap admissions at 15,000 was made earlier this month. Read more:

The US diplomats’ union has denounced an attempt by a Trump appointee to remove the “firewall” protecting the editorial independence of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and other US overseas broadcasters, warning that it marked an attempt to turn them into vehicles for “government propaganda”.

The CEO of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), Michael Pack, announced overnight on Monday that he would be rescinding the “firewall rule” insulating journalists from editorial direction from politically appointed management.

The rule, Pack argued, was “in tension with the law and harmful to the agency and the US national interest”.

“The rule threatened constitutional values because the constitution gives the president broad latitude in directing the foreign policy of the United States,” Pack wrote in a message to his staff.

The move follows several steps already taken by Pack, an ally of the rightwing ideologue Steve Bannon, to exercise greater political control USAGM broadcasters that include Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Asia and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. Since taking up the job in June, he has conducted a purge on senior journalists and refused to renew the visas of foreign reporters.

The American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) said it stood in solidarity with USAGM staff in opposition to the move

In a new series, Guardian US is zooming in on Maricopa county, a spot that could decide the fate of Trump – and America.

Maricopa county, which encompasses Arizona’s capital, Phoenix, and blossoming rings of surrounding suburbs, has nearly 4.5 million residents and dominates the state politically. One third of Maricopa residents identify as Latino, according to US census data.

Over the past decade, demographic change, population growth and a cultural shift seen across America’s suburbs has turned this sprawling desert metropolis – a bastion of western conservatism for decades – into one of the most closely watched and fiercely contested presidential battlegrounds in the nation.

The county holds the keys to winning Arizona, and no Republican has ever won the White House without winning this key Sun Belt state. In 2016, Donald Trump won here by just three percentage points. Can he do it again in 2020?

Read more from the opening piece in the series, Phoenix rising, here:

Updated

Health officials and scientists in the administration told the Daily Beast they were offended by a press release that listed “ending the Covid-19 pandemic” as a major accomplishment of Donald Trump’s and quoted the president’s daughter Ivanka alongside experts.

The Daily Beast reports:

In a statement released Tuesday afternoon The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy said that it considered “ending the COVID-19 pandemic” to be one of President Donald Trump’s major first term accomplishments. The office released a corresponding report that listed achievements of the Trump administration in the area of science and innovation.

“It’s mind boggling,” one official said of the White House’s assertion it had ended the pandemic. “There’s no world in which anyone can think that [statement] is true. Maybe the president. But I don’t see how even he can believe that. We have more than 70,000 new cases each day.”

Four officials working with the White House coronavirus task force told The Daily Beast that they viewed the White House’s statement as a personal slight and a public rebuke of their efforts to try and get control of the virus.

Officials described the report as the latest example of the president and his team of advisers refusing to acknowledge that the U.S. is experiencing a worrying resurgence of the virus.

“We have exploding case counts. Death rates will undoubtedly rise. They are living in a parallel universe that bears no relation to the reality that Americans are living,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control in the Obama administration. “And this idea that we should let it spread and protect the vulnerable is a really dangerous mistake. The idea that it [containing the virus] can’t be done ignores reality.”

Read more here.

Updated

At the Trump rally in Nebraska, the Los Angeles Times’ Eli Stokols writes that the Wifi network was called “Where is Hunter?” and the password was “10FORTHEBIGGUY”.

The network was “largely non-functioning,” he wrote in the Press Pool report.

Supporters at the rally, as they are wont to do, chanted “Lock him up,” when Trump’s speech turned to unsubstantiated and unverified accusations against his opponent Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

America's protest crackdown: five months after George Floyd, hundreds face trials and prison

Some protesters face stacked charges and threats of deportation; others have been charged with police assault with no reports of injuries

Protestors hold a vigil during a protest in PhoenixProtesters hold hands in front of police as they demonstrate against the death in Minneapolis police custody of African-American man George Floyd, and of Dion Johnson, who was killed in Arizona, outside of Phoenix police headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. May 29, 2020. Picture taken May 29, 2020. REUTERS/Nicole Neri
Protesters demonstrate outside of Phoenix police headquarters against the death of George Floyd, killed in Minneapolis, and Dion Johnson, killed in Arizona. Photograph: Nicole Neri/Reuters

Lee Percy Christian III didn’t think Arizona law enforcement could stop him from protesting – until they locked him up indefinitely.

Earlier this month, Christian, 27, was arrested for “unlawful assembly” after a Black Lives Matter protest in Phoenix and jailed without bond because of outstanding charges from previous demonstrations. Prosecutors later suggested bond be set at $100,000. Christian’s lawyers and a judge agreed he could be released on a lower bond – if he didn’t participate in future public protests.

Christian was mortified, but agreed to sign away his right to protests so he could leave jail – he had spent nine days locked up. “I’m guilty until proven innocent,” he said recently on the phone. “We’re in a police state, and the last thing the police want is for me to be out there using my voice.”

Since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, millions of Americans have marched in cities big and small to protests racial violence and police brutality. The demonstrations have been overwhelmingly nonviolent, yet in many jurisdictions law enforcement has responded with force. Tens of thousands of demonstrators, activists and BLM supporters have been arrested.

More than five months since the start of the unrest, hundreds of these protesters have been slapped with serious charges by federal and local prosecutors, according to researchers and a review of court data. Some protesters have faced stacked charges and threats of life sentences. Others have been charged with “assaulting” police officers where there’s no evidence of violence and no reports of injuries. Some arrested protesters have been transferred to immigration authorities.

The crackdown comes as Donald Trump, eager to put Democrats on the defense, has ramped up warnings about Black Lives Matter, anti-fascists and the “far left” in the lead up to the election. He has called BLM a “symbol of hate” and claimed without evidence that “Antifa” will “attack your homes”.

Survey: Indian Americans back Biden and Democrats

Indian Americans are overwhelmingly backing Joe Biden according to a new survey. Of more than Indian American citizens surveyed, 72% planned to vote for Biden and 22% for Trump.

Although Indian Americans make up about .8% of eligible voters in the US, both presidential campaigns have been courting them. The Biden/Harris campaign recently held a South Asian get out the vote rally, a virtual event that featured stars from the Netflix reality TV show Indian Matchmaker as well as Indian actors and public figures.

Kamla Harris, if elected, would become the first Black and Indian American vice-president in US history.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, has maintained a friendship with India’s rightwing prime minister, Narendra Modi, even hosting a “Howdy, Modi: Shared Dreams, Bright Futures” rally in Houston last year that drew hundreds of thousands.

But “the data show that Indian Americans continue to be strongly attached to the Democratic party, with little indication of a shift toward the Republican party,” said researchers from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the University of Pennsylvania.

“In addition, Indian Americans view US-India relations as a low priority issue in this electoral cycle, emphasizing instead nationally salient issues such as healthcare and the economy,” they wrote.

Updated

More than 70 million Americans have voted early

As of this evening, 70,032,485 Americans have already voted early – either in person or absentee, according to the US Elections Project.

The overwhelming enthusiasm has perhaps put this year on pace to see some of the highest voter participation rates in more than a century. Thus far, early voters have favored Democrats in most states that provide data on who is voting early, but Republicans have been narrowing the gap.

Updated

The protests in Philadelphia over the police killing of Walter Wallace Jr are still going strong.

Wallace Jr, 27, had mental health issues, said Shaka Johnson, a lawyer representing the family. The young man’s brother had called 911 asking for an ambulance to help this brother – the dispatcher was told that Wallace was suffering. But instead of an ambulance, police arrived, Johnson said.

“To think about calling for assistance and winding up with the people you called for assistance killing you,” he said. Justice means “reform in the Philadelphia Police Department and adequate training” he added.

Democratic campaigners are scrambling to convince American voters to deliver absentee ballots by hand rather than rely on the US postal service, after the supreme court sided with Republicans in Wisconsin in refusing to allow a count of votes arriving after election day.

Democrats argued that the flood of absentee ballots, and other challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic, made it necessary to extend the posting deadline. The court is due to hear similar cases from two pivotal battleground states, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, before 3 November.

With the bench now packed with a 6-3 conservative majority after the swearing in on Tuesday of the new Donald Trump-picked justice, Amy Coney Barrett, the supreme court has become the object of intense scrutiny.

Barrett, 48, was formally sworn in by the US chief justice, John Roberts, in a private ceremony on Tuesday, fuelling anxiety among Democrats over what her presence in the court might mean for other election-related cases, including any challenge to the result.

The Wisconsin decision triggered a rush by Democratic party campaign workers to track more than 360,000 so far unreturned mail-in ballots in the state. They urged voters to deliver their ballots by hand by 3 November rather than rely on a postal service that has been hamstrung by delays, some reportedly politically inspired.

“We’re phone banking. We’re text banking. We’re friend banking. We’re drawing chalk murals, driving sound trucks through neighborhoods & flying banners over Milwaukee. We’re running ads in every conceivable medium,” Ben Wikler, the party’s chairman in Wisconsin, tweeted after the supreme court decision.

Among the endorsers of dropping off one’s ballot – Lady Gaga:

Read more, from Peter Beaumont, Ed Pilkington in New York me:

The electoral map has shifted in 2020, amid new challenges from misinformation to mail-in ballots. Previously reliable states on both sides are now looking more competitive.

Helena Robertson, Ashley Kirk and Frank Hulley-Jones report:

In the interactive linked below, you decide which way these closer states will vote, and try to pave Joe Biden or Donald Trump’s path to victory.

Some states remain very likely to go to Biden or Trump because they were won by large margins in 2016, or they have voted the same way in several recent elections. Such states – ranked either a “solid” or “likely” win for either party, according to the Cook Political Report – have already been colored in for Biden and Trump in the graphic below.

A majority of 270 electoral votes out of a total of 538 is needed to win, and the remaining states are up to you.

It seems the president’s staff has been leaving notes and printouts for journalists in the White House press pool.

The printouts include a promo for upcoming Fox News programming, with the handwritten message: “Must-see TV”. Journalists also received a printout of early voting numbers by party affiliation in Michigan.

“The president wasn’t aware until somewhat recently that the press corps doesn’t have access to wifi” while aboard Air Force One, said Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg. “So he’s been leaving us printouts. It’s essentially a paperwork version of a tweet.”

Updated

Donald Trump’s campaign website was briefly down. The campaign said the website was “defaced”.

The site’s “About” section was replaced with what appeared to be a scam to collect cryptocurrency, TechCrunch reports. The new text read: “the world has had enough of the fake-news spreaded daily by president donald j trump. it is time to allow the world to know truth.”

Whoever switched out the website content also claimed to have information about “origin of the corona virus” and provided addresses to collect cryptocurrency.

“There was no exposure to sensitive data because none of it is actually stored on the site. The website has been restored,” said Trump communications director Tim Murtaugh.

Updated

Facebook’s moratorium on political ads in the last stretch before election day was full of glitches, according to campaigns.

Reuters reports:

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s digital director Rob Flaherty slammed the social media giant on Tuesday, saying on Twitter its systems broke “within seconds of launching the silly, performative pre-election hoop-jumping exercise.”

A Biden spokesman said an undisclosed number of his campaign’s ads were affected.

Under pressure to crack down on misinformation and other abuses, Facebook said last month it would impose a moratorium – or temporary ban – on new political ads in the week before Nov. 3 in an attempt to tamp down on misinformation on social media as Election Day approached.

The company stopped accepting new political or issue ads on Tuesday. Facebook said it would allow pre-existing ads to run during that period but would block any adjustments to the ads’ content or design.

A Facebook spokeswoman declined to answer Reuters questions, but Facebook’s director of product management Rob Leathern said on Twitter: “We’re investigating the issues of some ads being paused incorrectly, and some advertisers having trouble making changes to their campaigns.”

Campaigns rushed to submit any ads they might need for the election period ahead of the moratorium, strategists have told Reuters in recent days.

President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign started running pre-prepared ads touting GDP numbers that will not be released until Thursday.

Facebook Inc said on Tuesday it had rejected a pre-prepared Trump campaign ad that told users to “vote today,” because it did not have “the proper context or clarity” – a violation of its policies.

Updated

BBC Newsnight pressed an aggrieved John Bolton about his refusal to voluntarily testify in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

“You refused to tell the American people what you saw and what you knew,” said the BBC’s Emily Maitlis.

“You are absolutely wrong,” Bolton said.

“You were asked to testify ...” Maitlis pushed.

“Let me finish, let me finish,” Bolton retorted.

Watch the clip here:

Updated

As the future of Obamacare heads to the supreme court, so do trans rights.

Katelyn Burns reports:

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is scheduled to be argued before the supreme court on 4 November. The lawsuit – which has been widely panned by legal experts – was brought by 19 Republican state attorneys general and seeks to have the entire landmark healthcare law tossed out. The future of the ACA was a common theme during hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the high court – now that she has been confirmed, she will soon be hearing California v Texas, a case challenging the landmark healthcare law.

“Life for trans people in terms of access to healthcare before and after the ACA is like night and day,” said Shannon Minter, an expert in transgender law and an attorney at the National Center for Lesbian Rights. But many Americans don’t have a grasp on the important role the ACA has played for LGBTQ+ people, especially those who are transgender, potentially making this fall’s supreme court arguments the most critical transgender rights case ever heard at the court.

“If you were just going to point to a major case currently before the court that has the potential to have the greatest impact on transgender people it’s unquestionably the ACA,” said Minter, “I’m amazed that more people don’t understand this, that this hasn’t gotten more attention.”

Updated

Hi there - it’s Maanvi Singh, reporting from the West Coast.

As part of a new series we launched today, my colleague Lauren Gambino and I looked at Maricopa county’s transformation from conservative bastion to 2020 battleground.

A poll worker helps a voter cast their ballot at the Maricopa County Elections Department in Phoenix, Arizona on Oct. 15, 2020.
A poll worker helps a voter cast their ballot at the Maricopa County Elections Department in Phoenix, Arizona. Photograph: Caitlin O’Hara/The Guardian

The county, which encompasses Arizona’s capital, Phoenix, and blossoming rings of surrounding suburbs, has nearly 4.5 million residents and dominates the state politically. One third of Maricopa residents identify as Latino, according to US census data.

Over the past decade, demographic change, population growth and a cultural shift seen across America’s suburbs has turned this sprawling desert metropolis – a bastion of western conservatism for decades – into one of the most closely watched and fiercely contested presidential battlegrounds in the nation.

Winning a statewide election in Arizona without Maricopa is nearly impossible. And so it is likely that here, in the sprawl of stucco housing developments and retirement communities, voters will deliver a referendum on Trump – and the Republican party.

“If the president loses Arizona, it’ll be in large part because he lost Maricopa county,” Jeff Flake, the former Arizona senator, told the Guardian.

The Trump administration’s failure to control the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout has hastened the state’s political transformation – driving moderates, independents and even some conservatives away from the Republican party. Flake, a prominent Republican critic of Trump, has endorsed the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, for president along with Cindy McCain, the widow of the late Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential nominee, John McCain.

Arizona has voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election but one since 1952, but polling this year finds Biden with a narrow but steady lead over Trump. While it’s mathematically possible, no Republican has ever won the White House without the state’s 11 electoral votes.

So voters here are poised to decide not only who wins the White House, but which party controls the US Senate, which in turn will shape the national debate around immigration, education, healthcare and the climate crisis.

Read more:

Philadelphia police will be deploying more officers and have asked for the National Guard to assist them as the city braces for another night of protests in response to the police killing of Walter Wallace.

“Several hundred guardsmen” from the National Guard are expected to arrive in the city within the next two days, according to the Philadelphia inquirer.

Police commissioner Danielle Outlaw said the department is anticipating “additional incidents of civil unrest” tonight. Last night, protests started peacefully but later turned violent, with vandalism and looting of businesses and one police officer suffering a broken leg after being struck by a pickup truck.

Wallace was shot by police on Monday. He was holding a knife at the time of the shooting, though his family said that he was struggling with mental health issues and was on medication.

I’m signing off for now, but my Guardian colleague Maanvi Singh will be taking over for the next few hours. Stay tuned for more live updates.

Updated

The two presidential candidates are in key election states tonight holding rallies a week before Election Day.

Joe Biden just held a drive-in rally in Atlanta that had 365 cars and 771 people attending, according to a reporter on Twitter, one of the largest rallies Biden has held since the pandemic.

Biden had an optimistic tone when addressing the crowd. “I think we’re going to surprise the living devil out of everybody this year,” he said. “I can’t tell you how important it is that we flip the United States Senate. There’s no state more consequential than Georgia.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is in West Salem, Wisconsin, doing a lap in his motorcade around the LaCross Fairgrounds Speedway track.

At his rally, Trump is downplaying the pandemic even as Wisconsin sees its highest number of Covid infections yet. He’s criticizing the “fake news” for focusing on Covid.

A new survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) offers up some good news: more adults say they are wearing face masks. Reported use of masks increased from 78% in April to 89% in June.

The report also includes some information that’s not so great. Other mitigation behaviors, including social distancing, hand washing and avoiding crowded places, either saw declines or little changes from April to June.

The survey was administered when cases in the Northeast were spiking and then slowly dropped down as the summer began. States in the Sun Belt that ended up with huge surges in the middle of the summer were just starting to reopen nonessential businesses.

Unsurprisingly, young adults ages 18 to 29 were the least likely of any age group to practice mitigation behaviors. Earlier studies from the CDC have revealed that young adults were the most likely to be infected and transmit Covid-19.

More Donald Trump money news: a new New York Times report diving into Trump’s tax returns reveals that Deutsche Bank and other lenders have forgiven about $287m of the president’s debt that he failed to repay.

A large chunk of the money went toward constructing the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago in 2008, a dream project that failed to meet Trump’s vision and has become what the Times describes as “another disappointment in a portfolio filled with them”, particularly because of slow construction and a lack of tenants.

The story gives an exhaustive look into how the story of the Chicago tower is just another part of a pattern often seen in Trump’s business playbook: “a cycle of defaulting on debts and then persuading already-burned lenders to cut him a break”.

The Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago.
The Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago. Photograph: Kamil Krzaczyński/AFP via Getty Images

Updated

A judge in Michigan struck down a directive from Michigan’s secretary of state Jocelyn Benson that banned the open carry of firearms at polling places on election day.

A gun rights group filed a lawsuit against the directive. The judge, Christopher Murray, said that such a ban oversteps existing law and must go through the proper legislation process to go into effect. While open carry is restricted in churches and schools, which are often designated as voting locations, open carry is allowed in the rest of the state. The state’s chief of police told CNN that the directive would be difficult to enforce because there is currently no law against open carry in the state.

Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, said that she plans to appeal the judge’s decision “as this issue is of significant public interest and importance to our election process”.

Updated

Two stories published this afternoon reveal the kind of president Donald Trump is: one that cares more about his own wallet than those of taxpayers.

The Washington Post released the result of an investigation into how much Trump has personally profited off of taxpayers and his political supporters.

The president’s business has received at least $8.1 million since he took office from hosting meetings and events at his properties, like Mar-a-Lago, which Trump has referred to as “the Southern White House”. The Post says that Trump has made more than 280 visits to his hotels and clubs in his official capacity as president.

Meanwhile, a ProPublica report also published today reveals that the construction of Trump’s border wall has been costly, particularly because the Trump administration has failed to contain costs and encourage competitive pricing in contracts with construction companies.

Trump’s wall has costed about five times more than fencing built by the Bush and Obama administration, even though Trump has touted his skills as a savvy businessman. Additionally, many of the construction firms that have won contracts for the wall have executives who have donated to the campaigns of Trump or other Republicans, ProPublica reports.

This is Lauren Aratani taking over for Joan E Greve. Joe Biden’s campaign just released a statement on the shooting of Walter Wallace, a black man who was killed by police in Philadelphia yesterday.

“Our hearts are broken for the family of Walter Wallace Jr and for all those suffering the emotional weight of learning about another Black life in America lost,” the statement reads. “We cannot accept that in this country a mental health crisis ends in death.”

The statement also alluded to the protests that erupted in Philadelphia in response to the killing. A police officer suffered a broken leg after being struck by a pickup truck in the midst of the protests, and there were multiple reports of vandalism and looting.

“No amount of anger at the very real injustices in our society excuses violence. Attacking police officers and vandalizing small businesses, which are already struggling during a pandemic, does not bend the moral arc of the universe closer to justice,” the statement said.

Updated

Today so far

That’s it from me today. My Guardian colleague, Lauren Aratani, will take over the blog for the next couple of hours.

Here’s where the day stands so far:

  • Amy Coney Barrett officially joined the supreme court, after Chief Justice John Roberts delivered her judicial oath in a private ceremony this morning.
  • Trump lashed out against Barack Obama as the former president unleashed blistering criticism of his successor. Speaking at a drive-in rally in Orlando, Florida, Obama once again lambasted Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, noting the president has complained about the news coverage the pandemic has received as the US death toll continues to climb. “He’s jealous of Covid’s media coverage,” Obama said.
  • Biden delivered a speech in Warm Springs, Georgia, as polls show a close presidential race in the traditionally conservative state. “The president declared, he’s going to wage war on the virus. Instead he shrugged, swaggered and he surrendered,” Biden said in Warm Springs. “Well, I’m here to tell you we can and will get control of this virus.”
  • Trump falsely suggested it was illegal to count ballots after election day. “It would be very, very proper and very nice if a winner were declared on November 3, instead of counting ballots for two weeks, which is totally inappropriate, and I don’t believe that’s by our laws,” Trump told reporters before leaving Washington for his three campaign rallies today. In reality, states have until 8 December (known as the “safe harbor” deadline) to tabulate final election results.
  • A federal judge denied the justice department’s bid to take over Trump’s defense in E Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit. The judge ruled that the president was not acting in his official capacity when he denied Carroll’s rape allegation, as the justice department had argued.

Lauren will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

Updated

Trump baselessly cast doubt upon the foiled plot to kidnap Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer during his rally in Lansing, Michigan, which has now ended.

“I don’t think she likes me too much,” Trump said of the Michigan governor, as the rally crowd cheered.

“Hey, hey, hey, hey, I’m the one, it was our people that helped her out with her problem,” Trump added. “And we’ll wait to see if it is a problem, right? People are entitled to say, ‘Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t.’”

The FBI charged 14 people, several of whom had ties to a rightwing militia group, in connection to the plot.

“It was our people, my people, our people, that helped her out. And then she blamed me for it,” Trump said.

Whitmer reflected on the threat against her in an Atlantic piece that was published today:

Whitmer writes:

When I put my hand on the Bible at my inauguration, it did not occur to me that less than two years later, I would have to tell my daughters about a plot against me. But earlier this month, I learned that a multistate terrorist group was planning to kidnap and possibly kill me. Law-enforcement announced charges against 14 people as part of the plot. As jarring as that was, just over a week later, President Donald Trump traveled to Michigan, and when a crowd chanted ‘Lock her up’ after he mentioned me, he said, ‘Lock them all up.’

I am not surprised. I have watched the president wedge a deeper divide in our country; refuse to denounce white supremacists on a national debate stage; and launch cruel, adolescent attacks on women like Senator Kamala Harris and public-health leaders like Anthony Fauci. And while I won’t let anything distract me from doing my job as governor, I will not stand back and let the president, or anyone else, put my colleagues and fellow Americans in danger without holding him accountable.

Here are the latest early voting numbers: more than 69 million ballots have already been cast in the election.

According to the US Elections Project, 69,257,810 Americans have voted by mail or early in person as of today. That accounts for more than half of the country’s total turnout in 2016.

Texas’ turnout remains the highest in the country, both in terms of raw vote count and as a proportion of its 2016 total.

About 7.8 million Texans have already voted in the election, representing nearly 87% of the state’s total 2016 turnout.

And there is still a week left until Election Day.

During her Pennsylvania campaign event, the first lady acknowledged she sometimes takes issue with Trump’s combative communication style.

“I don’t always agree with the way he says things,” Melania Trump said of her husband.

That line was met with laughter from the crowd assembled for the first lady’s event, according to pool reporter Emily Goodin of the Daily Mail.

Melania Trump has launched a campaign called “Be Best” to discourage online bullying, an effort that seems to be at odds with her husband’s frequent personal attacks against his opponents over Twitter.

The first lady also echoed her husband’s attacks on Biden while speaking to Trump supporters in Pennsylvania.

Melania Trump nodded toward Biden’s frequent criticism of the president’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Now he suggests that he could have done a better job,” the first lady said. “Well, the American people can look at Joe Biden’s 36 years in Congress and eight years in the vice presidency and determine whether they think he’ll finally be able to get something done for the American people.”

Trump has similarly suggested his Democratic rival is “all talk and no action”, while dismissing criticism that his own administration did not act quickly enough to respond to the pandemic.

Updated

First lady holds first campaign event since coronavirus diagnosis

First lady Melania Trump is now speaking in Atglen, Pennsylvania, marking her first event on the campaign trail since she tested positive for coronavirus earlier this month.

The first lady opened her remarks by thanking everyone for their well wishes when her family was diagnosed with coronavirus, saying, “Thank you for the all the love you gave us when our family was diagnosed with Covid-19. We are feeling so much better now thanks to healthy living and some of the amazing therapeutic options available in our country.”

The first lady was supposed to make a campaign trip to Pennsylvania last week, but she canceled the visit because of her lingering coronavirus symptoms, including a persistent cough.

Updated

As he often does during campaign stops in the Midwest, Trump went after Ilhan Omar, the progressive congresswoman from Minnesota.

Speaking in Lansing, Michigan, the president warned Democrats would allow far more refugees from countries like Syria and Somalia into the US if they gain power.

“When I think of Somalia, I think of Omar,” Trump said. “Ilhan Omar, who truly does not like our country.”

The president went on to predict that dislike of Omar would allow him to win Minnesota, where polls show Trump trailing Biden by about 9 points.

Trump attacked Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer during his campaign rally in Lansing, Michigan.

“Your governor’s a disaster,” Trump said of Whitmer. “They’ve got to open up this state.”

The Lansing crowd responded to Trump’s attacks on Whitmer by chanting, “Lock her up!”

Whitmer was recently the target of a foiled kidnapping plot, and she wrote about the experience in a piece published by the Atlantic today.

Whitmer writes:

When I put my hand on the Bible at my inauguration, it did not occur to me that less than two years later, I would have to tell my daughters about a plot against me. But earlier this month, I learned that a multistate terrorist group was planning to kidnap and possibly kill me. Law-enforcement announced charges against 14 people as part of the plot. As jarring as that was, just over a week later, President Donald Trump traveled to Michigan, and when a crowd chanted ‘Lock her up’ after he mentioned me, he said, ‘Lock them all up.’

I am not surprised. I have watched the president wedge a deeper divide in our country; refuse to denounce white supremacists on a national debate stage; and launch cruel, adolescent attacks on women like Senator Kamala Harris and public-health leaders like Anthony Fauci. And while I won’t let anything distract me from doing my job as governor, I will not stand back and let the president, or anyone else, put my colleagues and fellow Americans in danger without holding him accountable.

Speaking to supporters in Lansing, Trump predicted the country would see “a great red wave” next Tuesday.

Shortly before leaving for Michigan, the president similarly predicted Republicans would flip the House on Election Day.

In reality, strategists from both parties say Democrats will keep control of the House, and many believe Republicans will lose additional seats next week.

Trump holds Michigan campaign rally

Trump is now speaking at his campaign rally in Lansing, Michigan, the first of the president’s three rallies today.

The president claimed that he is “leading almost everywhere,” with just one week to go until election day.

In reality, Biden is ahead in national polls by an average of about 9 points, and the Democrat is leading in Michigan by an average of about 8 points.

Updated

The Trump team is mocking Biden by deceptively editing a video of his remarks today in Warm Springs, Georgia.

One of the Trump campaign’s Twitter accounts tweeted out a video of Biden quoting questions that Pope Francis said politicians should ask themselves.

“Why am I doing this? Why? What is my real aim?” Biden asked, quoting the pope.

The Trump campaign’s video did not include the context for Biden’s questions, making it seem like the Democratic nominee had gotten confused while delivering the speech.

Biden’s deputy rapid response director pushed back against the Trump team by accusing the campaign of “attacking Joe Biden’s faith”.

Updated

The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports:

There’s just one week left until election day, which means that if voters still have a mail-in ballot, they should put it in the mail today to guarantee that it arrives by election day in order to be counted.

Tuesday is the last day the United States Postal Service (USPS) says voters should put their ballot in the mail if they want to guarantee its delivery by election day.

The USPS has long said it will do everything it can to deliver ballots on time, and early data shows it is trying to meet that commitment. NBC reported however that mail service has dipped.

Many election officials are already advising voters to forego the mail altogether and return their ballots in person if they are able to. If a voter is unable to put their ballot in the mail by Tuesday, they should not mail it later this week - they should either return it directly to their election office or a secure drop box.

More than 44.6 million people have voted by mail so far, and there are still more than 28.9 unreturned mail in ballots, according to Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida who closely tracks early voting data.

Different states have different requirements for when ballots must be returned in order to count. Voters should check with their local election office to determine the deadline in their state.

The first pool reports for Melania Trump’s campaign trip to Pennsylvania are great ones for fans of incomprehensible Beltway media jargon, aka me:

First Lady Melania Trump is headed to Atglen, Pennsylvania, today for her first solo campaign event this year. She arrived at Joint Base Andrews at 1.12pm via Marine One.

She traveled to JBA with POTUS, who is off on a campaign trip of his own. FLOTUS got into an SUV at JBA from where Marine One landed and drove over to Executive One Foxtrot. She arrived at her plane at 1.24pm pm. She did not respond to questions.

Pool traveled from the White House to JBA separately from FLOTUS. Pooler saw [White House counsellor Kellyanne] Conway board one of the vans at the White House ahead of our departure to JBA to meet FLOTUS.

… Executive One Foxtrot took off from JBA at 1.39pm after Air Force One left. We were wheels down Lancaster at 2.05 pm.

The First Lady, wearing a green Michael Michael Kors coat … exited the plane at 2.12pm. She smiled and waved but did not answer a question if she was excited to be campaigning. She is not wearing a face mask.

Arrival was lovely with trees and their autumn colored leaves visible as the plane descended. It is a balmy 61 degrees out. At 2.15 pm we are motorcading to Atglen, which is about a 45-minute drive.

Melania’s first engagement back on the trail since recovering from Covid-19 is due to kick off at 3pm ET. More:

Updated

Biden just concluded his speech in Warm Springs, Georgia, once again pledging to never wave “the white flag of surrender” against the coronavirus pandemic.

“The president declared, he’s going to wage war on the virus. Instead he shrugged, swaggered and he surrendered,” Biden said.

“Well, I’m here to tell you we can and will get control of this virus,” the Democratic nominee said.

With that, Biden ended his speech, urging audience members to wear masks before he departed.

Biden has repeatedly lauded the values and achievements of Franklin Delano Roosevelt while speaking in Warm Springs, Georgia, where FDR frequently visited to ameliorate his health issues.

Biden has said he is currently reading a book about FDR’s first 100 days in office, which came as the country was in the throes of the Great Depression.

Speaking in Warm Springs, Georgia, Biden reflected on the lasting impact of the coronavirus pandemic, which has already claimed more than 226,000 American lives.

“The tragic truth of our time is that Covid has left a deep and lasting wound in this country,” Biden said.

“Our wounds are getting deeper. Many wonder, have we gone too far? Have we passed the point of no return? Is the heart of this nation turned to stone?” Biden asked. “I don’t think so. I refuse to believe it.”

The Democratic nominee added, “Warm Springs is a good place to talk about hope and healing.”

Biden then reflected on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s frequent trips to the Georgia town to enjoy its natural hot springs, arguing America needs a president who has the values FDR embodied: “humility, empathy, courage, optimism.”

Biden speaks in Warm Springs, Georgia

Biden is now speaking in Warm Springs, Georgia, as polls show him and Trump running neck and neck in the traditionally conservative state.

“Today I’m here in Warm Springs because I want to talk about how we’re going to heal our nation,” Biden said.

The Democratic nominee also noted the Georgia town’s connections to presidential history.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt frequently went to Warm Springs to enjoy the town’s natural hot springs, and the 32nd president died there in 1945.

Trump falsely suggests it is illegal to count ballots after Election Day

Trump falsely said that it was against the law to count ballots after Election Day, even though tabulating every valid vote is necessary and is often a days-long process.

Speaking to reporters before leaving for his three campaign rallies today, the president said it would be “very proper and very nice if a winner were declared” on the night of the election.

“It would be very, very proper and very nice if a winner were declared on November 3, instead of counting ballots for two weeks, which is totally inappropriate, and I don’t believe that’s by our laws. I don’t believe that. So we’ll see what happens,” Trump said.

In reality, election officials must continue tabulating results after Election Day to ensure every valid vote, including absentee ballots cast by service members currently overseas, is counted.

States officially have until December 8 ( known as the “safe harbor” deadline) to report final results.

Moments after Trump made that baseless assertion, a Democratic senator called on his Republican colleagues to weigh in on the matter.

As Biden’s motorcade made its way to his event in Warm Springs, Georgia, reporters saw a crowd of Trump supporters and a separate crowd of Biden supporters waiting along the route to greet the Democratic nominee.

The two groups reflected Georgia’s newfound status as a toss-up state in this presidential election. According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average of the traditionally conservative state, Biden has a 1.2-point advantage in Georgia.

Biden will soon deliver his speech in Warm Springs, Georgia, as polls show him and Trump locked in a close race in the traditionally conservative state.

No Democratic presidential candidate has won Georgia since 1992, but recent polls have given Biden’s team hope that he could flip the state.

The AP reports:

He planned to unveil his closing message during a Tuesday speech in Warm Springs, Georgia, where natural hot springs offered President Franklin Delano Roosevelt comfort as he battled polio and governed a nation weathering the Great Depression and World War II.

The former vice president’s campaign says his appearance will bookend his visit earlier this month to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when Biden used the site of the bloody Civil War battle to issue a call for bipartisanship and putting country ahead of party. On Tuesday, he will try to evoke Roosevelt’s New Deal sensitivities while promising to restore the nation’s character.

Donald and Melania Trump just left the White House for their separate campaign trips today.

Donald and Melania Trump walk to Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House.
Donald and Melania Trump walk to Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP

The president will hold rallies in Michigan, Wisconsin and Nebraska today, while the first lady heads to Pennsylvania.

This marks the first lady’s first campaign trip since she tested positive for coronavirus earlier this month.

Melania Trump was supposed to travel to Pennsylvania last week, but she canceled the trip due to her lingering coronavirus symptoms, including a persistent cough.

Today so far

Here’s where the day stands so far:

  • Amy Coney Barrett officially joined the supreme court, after Chief Justice John Roberts delivered her judicial oath in a private ceremony this morning.
  • Trump lashed out against Barack Obama as the former president delivered a blistering speech in Orlando, Florida. Obama once again criticized his successor’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, noting Trump has complained about the news coverage the pandemic has received as the US death toll continues to climb. “He’s jealous of Covid’s media coverage,” Obama said.
  • A federal judge denied the justice department’s bid to take over Trump’s defense in E Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit. The judge ruled that the president was not acting in his official capacity when he denied Carroll’s rape allegation, as the justice department had argued.

The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

Barack Obama just concluded his speech at a drive-in rally in Orlando, Florida, with one week to go until Election Day.

Reflecting the bizarre nature of campaigning during a global pandemic, Obama concluded his speech by encouraging attendees, “Honk if you’re fired up. Honk if you’re ready to go.”

The former president’s words were met with a flurry of car honks and cheers. “Let’s go do this thing,” Obama concluded. “Let’s bring it home.”

Barack Obama criticized Trump for cozying up to dictators, saying he was unsurprised that leaders like Vladimir Putin wanted to see the president win reelection.

Obama compared Trump’s outreach to dictators to his behavior during his “60 Minutes” interview, which the president cut short after Lesley Stahl pressed him on his response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Our current president, he whines that ‘60 Minutes’ is too tough,” Obama said. “You think he’s gonna stand up to dictators? He thinks Lesley Stahl is a bully.”

Trump lashes out against Fox for broadcasting Obama's speech

Fox News is carrying Barack Obama’s speech in Orlando live, and one of its viewers, the president, is not happy about it.

“Now @FoxNews is playing Obama’s no crowd, fake speech for Biden, a man he could barely endorse because he couldn’t believe he won,” Trump said in a tweet.

Repeating an odd claim he made during the final presidential debate, Trump added, “Also, I PREPAID many Millions of Dollars in Taxes.”

The New York Times found that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he won the presidency.

And Obama is addressing a small crowd at the Orlando drive-in rally because the Biden campaign has sharply restricted attendance at its events to limit the risk of coronavirus spread.

In the final weeks before the election, Trump has held a number of large outdoor rallies with no social distancing and infrequent mask usage, even as coronavirus cases surge across the country.

Speaking in Orlando, Barack Obama also mocked Jared Kushner’s comments about Trump’s outreach to African American voters.

Kushner told Fox News yesterday, “The thing we’ve seen in the Black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump’s policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they’re complaining about, but he can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful.”

Obama said of Kushner’s comments, “Now his advisers are out there saying — including his son-in-law — his son-in-law says Black folks have to want to be successful. That’s the problem.

“Who are these folks? What history books do they read? Who do they talk to?”

Barack Obama once again accused Trump of exacerbating the suffering caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

“A pandemic would’ve been challenging for any president,” Obama said. “But this idea that somehow this White House has done anything but completely screw this thing up is nonsense.”

Obama also made a character-based pitch for Biden, describing his former running mate as a “man of principle” who would empathize with the pain of the American people.

Repeating a line he has delivered before, Obama said, “I can tell you the presidency doesn’t change who you are — it reveals who you are.”

Obama mocks Trump: 'He’s jealous of Covid’s media coverage'

Barack Obama has taken the stage for his drive-in rally in Orlando, Florida, where he is addressing hundreds of Biden supporters as they stand alongside their cars.

“One week Orlando, we’ve got one week -- si se puede -- one week until the most important election of our lifetimes,” Obama told the crowd.

The former president once again sharply criticized his successor over his response to the coronavirus pandemic. Obama noted Trump has complained about how much coverage the pandemic has received, as the death toll continues to climb.

“He’s jealous of COVID’s media coverage,” Obama said. He accused Trump of having “turned the White House into a hot zone” after two coronavirus outbreaks among the president and his senior staff.

“Florida, we can’t afford four more years of this,” Obama said. “We cannot afford this kind of incompetence and disinterest.”

Updated

Barack Obama will soon speak at a drive-in rally in Orlando, Florida, as polls show Biden and Trump running neck and neck in the swing state.

The Biden campaign said more than 270 cars had been brought in to the area outside the Camping World Stadium in Orlando to hear Obama speak.

The event come three days after Obama held another drive-in rally in North Miami. The former president carried Florida in 2008 and 2012.

The NBC News team shifted two states in its Electoral College forecast, one in favor of Democrats and one in favor of Republicans.

Arizona has moved from Lean Democratic to Toss Up, and Texas has moved from Lean Republican to Toss Up.

The NBC political team explains its rationale for the changes:

We were torn on Arizona. Biden maintains his lead there, but the polling has tightened. And right now, it seems to be in a different place than Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which is why we’ve moved it to Toss Up. ...

Texas: Biden has decreased his spending to about $600,000 for the week (and he’s getting outside help), while Trump and GOP outside groups were dark.

Biden is still in an enviable position in the NBC forecast, as the Democratic nominee remains above 270 votes with the states likely to go his way.

Trump is once again attacking Barack Obama, who has been hitting the campaign trail for Biden in recent days.

“Obama is drawing VERY small (tiny) numbers of people. Biden is drawing almost no one. We are drawing tens of thousands of people. You’ll see that again today. The Great Red Wave is coming!!!” Trump said in a new tweet.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the Biden campaign has been sharply restricting attendance at its events due to the ongoing global pandemic.

The Trump campaign has taken far fewer precautions, holding large outdoor rallies with no social distancing and inconsistent mask usage.

Obama will be in Orlando, Florida, today, to campaign at a drive-in rally for Biden.

Barrett officially joins supreme court after Roberts administers oath

Amy Coney Barrett has officially joined the supreme court, after Chief Justice John Roberts administered her second judicial oath in a private ceremony this morning.

Barrett can now begin her work as a supreme court justice, still in time to potentially help determine crucial election-related cases and (of course) the case involving the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.

Oral arguments in the ACA case, which Democrats have warned could threaten millions of Americans’ healthcare coverage, will be heard a week after the presidential election.

Barrett joins the court a little over a month after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

An important note: a federal judge’s ruling that the justice department cannot intervene on Trump’s behalf in E Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit effectively keeps her complaint alive.

As Pete Williams of NBC News explained, if the judge had ruled that the justice department was allowed to take over Trump’s defense, Carroll’s lawsuit would be moot because it is not possible to sue the government for defamation.

Given that the judge ruled Trump was not acting in his official capacity as president when he denied Carroll’s rape allegation, as the justice department tried to argue, the defamation lawsuit can move forward.

Senator Ted Cruz said he did not believe Trump’s attacks on Hunter Biden were motivating “a single voter” in the final days before the presidential election.

Sitting down for an interview with Axios’ Jonathan Swan, Cruz reflected on Trump and Biden’s performances in the final presidential debate.

The Republican senator said he believed Biden’s best moment during the debate was when he said, “It’s not about his family and my family. It’s about your family, and your family is hurting badly.”

When Swan pressed Cruz on whether he thought the attacks on Biden’s family were effective, the senator replied, “I don’t think it moves a single voter.”

Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer wrote a piece for the Atlantic about the thwarted plot to kidnap her.

The Democratic governor writes:

When I put my hand on the Bible at my inauguration, it did not occur to me that less than two years later, I would have to tell my daughters about a plot against me. But earlier this month, I learned that a multistate terrorist group was planning to kidnap and possibly kill me. Law-enforcement announced charges against 14 people as part of the plot. As jarring as that was, just over a week later, President Donald Trump traveled to Michigan, and when a crowd chanted ‘Lock her up’ after he mentioned me, he said, ‘Lock them all up.’

I am not surprised. I have watched the president wedge a deeper divide in our country; refuse to denounce white supremacists on a national debate stage; and launch cruel, adolescent attacks on women like Senator Kamala Harris and public-health leaders like Anthony Fauci. And while I won’t let anything distract me from doing my job as governor, I will not stand back and let the president, or anyone else, put my colleagues and fellow Americans in danger without holding him accountable.

Every time the president ramps up this violent rhetoric, every time he fires up Twitter to launch another broadside against me, my family and I see a surge of vicious attacks sent our way. This is no coincidence, and the president knows it. He is sowing division and putting leaders, especially women leaders, at risk. And all because he thinks it will help his reelection.

Earlier this month, the FBI announced charges against 14 people, several of them with ties to a rightwing militia group, in connection to the plot to kidnap Whitmer.

A lawyer representing E Jean Carroll applauded a federal judge’s ruling denying the justice department’s bid to take over Trump’s defense in the defamation lawsuit.

“We are very pleased that the federal court interpreted the plain text of Federal Tort Claims Act as not covering President Trump’s false statements about our client, E. Jean Carroll,” lawyer Roberta Kaplan said in a statement.

“The simple truth is that President Trump defamed our client because she was brave enough to reveal that he had sexually assaulted her, and that brutal, personal attack cannot be attributed to the Office of the President.”

Kaplan added, “We look forward to moving forward with E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case against Donald Trump in his personal capacity in federal court.”

The Trump team is delivering its own closing message, tweeting an edited video of the president throwing hats to his supporters that makes it look like he is hitting Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden with them.

The video includes multiple clips of Clinton tripping, and it is edited to make it appear as though she falls after being hit by a “Make America Great Again” hat.

Biden appears in the video only once, seeming to get hit in the head with a MAGA hat.

As a reminder, it is seven days until Election Day; Hillary Clinton is not the Democratic nominee; Trump is 9 points down against Biden in national polls; more than 225,000 Americans have died of coronavirus.

Federal judge denies DOJ's bid to intervene in Trump defamation suit

A federal judge has ruled the justice department cannot intervene on Trump’s behalf in a defamation lawsuit brought by E Jean Carroll.

“The President of the United States is not an ‘employee of the Government within the meaning of the relevant statutes,” wrote Judge Lewis A Kaplan in his ruling.

“Even if he were such an ‘employee,’ President Trump’s allegedly defamatory statements concerning Ms. Carroll would not have been within the scope of his employment.”

Carroll has accused Trump of rape, an allegation that the president denied, prompting her defamation lawsuit.

The justice department, under the leadership of attorney general William Barr, moved last month to take over Trump’s defense in the lawsuit.

Biden has released his closing message ads, which will air nationwide in the final week before the presidential election.

The two ads feature the nominee and his wife, Jill Biden, speaking directly to the camera about the stakes of this election.

In Biden’s ad, he delivers much the same message that he used to launch his campaign, arguing the US is “in a battle for the soul of the nation.”

“I believe that even more deeply today,” Biden says in the ad. “Who we are, what we stand for, and maybe most importantly who we’re going to be, it’s all at stake.”

Biden adds, “Character is on the ballot, the character of the country, and this is our opportunity to leave the dark, angry politics of the past four years behind us.”

We’ll find out in seven days how much Biden’s message has resonated with American voters.

This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Belam.

Today on the campaign trail: Trump will hold three rallies today in Michigan, Wisconsin and Nebraska, while Biden is delivering a speech in Georgia.

Joe Biden speaks to people while visiting a voter mobilization center in Chester, Pennsylvania.
Joe Biden speaks to people while visiting a voter mobilization center in Chester, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

It is rather remarkable that a Democratic presidential nominee is in Georgia a week before Election Day, considering the traditionally conservative state has not voted for a Democrat in a presidential race since 1992.

But polls show Biden and Trump running neck and neck in Georgia, which the president won by 5 points in 2016. A poll released yesterday by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed the two nominees virtually tied in the state. If Trump loses Georgia, his hopes of winning a second term will dwindle to almost nothing.

And the president’s trip to Omaha, Nebraska, is also noteworthy. The state’s 2nd congressional district awards one electoral vote, and Barack Obama was the last Democrat to win it in 2008. According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden is favored to win Nebraska-2 this year.

Donald Trump Jr has just retweeted Derek Hunter saying that “Leftists really seem to want dead police officers” in connection to the shooting of Walter Wallace Jr in Philadelphia.

Authorities in Philadelphia have said they will investigate the circumstances of the shooting.

Witnesses say that Wallace’s mother was there attempting to shield her son from the officers, while the dead man’s father has subsequently told reporters “Why didn’t they use a taser? His mother was trying to defuse the situation. He has mental issues. Why you have to gun him down?”

Read more here: Philadelphia protesters take to streets after police killing of black man

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany once praised Joe Biden as “a man of the people” capable of “coming off as human” and “resonating with middle class voters”.

In an interview with a New York radio station in 2015, she also said that though she thought Donald Trump would be more likely to beat Biden, then considering a run for president, than Hillary Clinton, “I think the juxtaposition of kind of the man of the people and kind of this tycoon, is a problem.”

A week before Trump faces Biden for re-election, the comments from five years ago were reported by Andrew Kaczynski of CNN, a reporter who specialises in burrowing through the strata of internet time, looking for forgotten comments by public figures which now seem unfortunate or embarrassment.

“I think the Republicans run into a problem if it is Joe Biden and if it is maybe a Trump on the other side,” McEnany told AM970 in 2015. “Because Joe Biden, one of the things he is remarkable at is really kind of being a man of the people and resonating with middle class voters. Feeling like – coming off as human. His gaffes – as much as we make fun of them – to a certain extent they make him look human. So not, since he’s likable.”

McEnany also said, presciently, that though “the juxtaposition of kind of the man of the people and kind of this tycoon, is a problem” in any Biden-Trump match-up, “Donald Trump’s remarkably coming off as a man of the people despite being this wealthy business tycoon.”

The same week, McEnany spoke to Fox Business Network.

“When you have Joe Biden here who’s funny and likeable and can resonate with the middle class,’ she said, “he really can speak to the average, everyday American, versus Hillary Clinton who’s cold and somber. Remember when she had to – that calculated move of drinking a drink at a bar to seem like a human being. Joe Biden is a human and people will resonate with that. I predict he will be the nominee.”

Biden wasn’t, of course, but he is now and a week out from election day he leads the incumbent president in most national polls and in most battleground states, though some leads are narrowing as Trump campaigns hard.

In a statement to CNN, McEnany parroted Trump administration attack lines when she had now learned of Biden’s “profound personal corruption” and called him “an empty vessel for the liberal elites and far left”.

Well, this is awkward, part 1,057…

The New York Times has reported, citing a senior Bloomberg aide, that Mike Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor who lost to Biden in a crowded field for the Democratic nomination, has vowed to spend up to $100 million of his personal fortune to support Biden’s campaign for the White House.

Bloomberg has been targeting Florida as a state he could push into the Biden column and on Monday he agreed to add Texas and Ohio for a late television advertising blitz, after his team presented polling data showing them as competitive, the Times said.

He will also increase pro-Biden advertising in Florida, the report said: “We believe that Florida will go down to the wire, and we were looking for additional opportunities to expand the map,” Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson told the Times. “Texas and Ohio present the best opportunities to do that, in our view.”

Trump won Texas and Ohio in his 2016 election, and holding on to both states is crucial to his re-election prospects. As the second and seventh most populous states, both are prizes in the state-by-state contests that decide the presidential race.

The teenager who recorded the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in May will be honored in December by PEN America, the literary and human rights organization, according to reports from the Associated Press.

Darnella Frazier will be presented the PEN/Benenson Courage Award. “With nothing more than a cell phone and sheer guts, Darnella changed the course of history in this country, sparking a bold movement demanding an end to systemic anti-Black racism and violence at the hands of police,” PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said in a statement Tuesday.

The 17-year-old Frazier will share the Courage Award with Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine who was pushed out by the Trump administration.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, PEN had postponed its annual gala from 19 May 19, six days before Floyd’s death, to 8 December, and will host the event online.

“Darnella Frazier took an enormous amount of flak in the wake of releasing the video,” Nossel told the Associated Press. “People were accusing her of being in it for the money, or for being famous, or were asking why she didn’t intervene. And it was just left this way. We wanted to go back and recognize and elevate this singular act.”

Cecile Richards writes for us this morning that with the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court, it is not only abortion rights and Roe v Wade on the line. Parental leave, affordable childcare, equal pay, the Affordable Care Act - all are under threat. That should be a wake-up call to female voters, she says.

It’s outrageous that an impeached president who lost the popular vote can install a supreme court justice who would gut the Affordable Care Act despite majority support for the law – a law that made it so that women can no longer be charged more for health coverage because of our gender, or denied insurance because of a pre-existing condition such as breast cancer. It’s equally outrageous to see Republican senators prioritizing this bad-faith confirmation process despite their failure to pass a desperately-needed coronavirus relief bill. But none of this is surprising. Barrett’s nomination is part of a broader effort by the extreme right to allow minority views to rule over the will of the majority of Americans – in this case, women.

Women have been the majority of voters in every national election since 1964, and we represent the majority of mail-in ballots and early votes heading into November. Over the last four years, we have shown our political force by marching for women’s rights and Black lives, volunteering for causes, and donating to campaigns. We are a supermajority, and we should have the undivided attention of every elected official in this country. But we don’t, and that’s because deliberate efforts to undermine our democracy have created a system that’s less and less responsive to the needs of the people, especially women.

Read more here: Cecile Richards – Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment is a wake-up call for female voters

Twitter will begin “pre-bunking” misinformation at the top of American users’ timelines in the final week before the US election, the company has announced. Facts about voting by mail and, once the count begins, election results, will be placed on the top of the timeline in an effort to get ahead of viral falsehoods before they are even posted.

“Election experts confirm that voting by mail is safe and secure, even with an increase in mail-in ballots,” says one message the company will run. “Even so, you might encounter unconfirmed claims that voting by mail leads to election fraud ahead of the 2020 US elections.”

Twitter says the practice is an important new tool in its fight against viral misinformation, because it does not require the company to wait for a specific falsehood to be shared and then debunked. Under the company’s current approach, the only people to ever see its fact-check labels, which are applied to topics including Covid and voting, are those who have already seen a tweet with misinformation, placing the company on a permanent back foot.

“Pre-bunk” branding aside, the approach mirrors the strategy Facebook and Instagram have been using to fight Covid misinformation since the early days of the pandemic. Both sites have received prominent banners at the top of their respective feeds, which Facebook says has led to more than 600 million people clicking through to read information from health authorities including the NHS and WHO.

Axios have an exclusive this morning that post-election, the Lincoln Project is looking to turn itself into a media company.

Sara Fischer says that it is part of a new trend of activists developing massive audiences for political influence that they are then able to spin into commercial media success. She writes:

The Lincoln group, which is run by prominent “Never-Trumper” Republicans like Ron Steslow, Rick Wilson, George Conway, Jennifer Horn, Reed Galen, Mike Madrid and Steve Schmidt, has transformed from an election-focused advertising PAC into a media company with millions of followers. Already, its main account boasts a following bigger than the GOP’s main account and the main accounts of groups like Crooked Media on Twitter.

The group has been responsible for a series of slick viral videos for social media that back Joe Biden against Donald Trump.

Read more here: Axios – the Lincoln Project is becoming a media business

For Slate this morning Lili Loofbourow has tried to sum up how this year’s election campaign manages to seem to both be frantically urgent, and also relentlessly dull at the same time, even though so much is at stake. In a piece titled “Nothing left to say” she writes:

Extraordinarily turbulent news cycles have provoked very little change in a surprisingly stable Biden lead. Trump’s presidency has driven home the extent to which Americans overwhelmed by information become amnesiacs: Fresh occasions for anger abound to such an extent that it’s difficult to remember what happened even two weeks ago.

Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the supreme court has been received with an almost eerie calm. It’s possible Democrats simply recognized a lost battle.

This campaign hasn’t been waged over policy issues. There is simply no way to fruitfully compare Trump’s promise of a replacement health care plan he calls “beautiful” but hasn’t bothered to produce to Biden’s concrete proposal that would include a public option

When Biden accused Trump of accepting no responsibility for how the coronavirus has been handled, Trump’s extraordinary response was: “I take full responsibility. It’s not my fault.”

There is too much to be angry about, but the anger is not interesting; it has matured to an urgent feeling that this simply must end. As my colleague Jordan Weissmann put it, “It feels like there’s so much going on, and just nothing really left to say about it.”

There is no more to see and no more to say. Everyone knows what they need to know. These two men are extremely well-known. Fifty million Americans have voted already, and we are all exhausted from cycling through manic news cycles that are taking us nowhere new.

We are sicker, poorer, lonelier, and sadder. No relief bill appears to be in sight. Businesses will close and infections will rise until we end this. We have (at least) one anxious week to go before this interminable election is over. All there is to do now is vote.

Read more here: Slate – Lili Loofbourow – Nothing left to say

It’s been like this for quite a while now, but I’m still not entirely sure I’ll ever get used to the official press secretary of the president of the United States tweeting out things from her personal account about “The haters at CNN” and so forth. But here we are…

Here’s Trisha Garcia in El Paso for us, with the latest on the coronavirus crisis that has engulfed the Texas border city:

Donald Trump told a campaign rally on Saturday that the US was wasting money on coronavirus tests, claiming mass testing was only inflating the number of cases and fueling a media obsession while, in reality, “you don’t see death”.

But El Paso is seeing too much death right now. Local funeral director Jorge Ortiz has been forced to put an overflow of bodies into a chapel at one of his six funeral home locations.

“We actually converted one of our chapels into a cooler. We’re not gonna be able to have visitations there any more, said Ortiz, general manager of Perches Funeral Homes in the west Texas city, on the border with Mexico.

He’s handled 290 coronavirus funerals in the city and four out of five families seeking his services this month are mourning the loss of a loved one who succumbed to the virus.

“We know this is real,” Ortiz said. “We face Covid every day.”

El Paso county is dealing with 11,000 active cases, almost triple the number of cases it recorded in the previous July-August peak, and reported 1,216 new cases on Saturday, the highest single-day increase the county has seen. More than 850 people are now hospitalized with the virus, straining the local system.

Read more here: ‘We’re in a crisis stage’: Texas border city reels from coronavirus surge

The president is again asserting that the media will stop talking about Coronavirus on 4 November, as it is only being reported in the context of the election.

Here’s a contrary view in the replies to Trump’s tweet this morning.

And here are the latest figures, which show that contrary to the president’s assertion, the numbers do not appear to be rounding the turn. Daily new cases are currently 40% higher than they were two weeks ago. Daily deaths are currently 14% higher than they were two weeks ago.

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On Sunday, Democratic nominee Joe Biden appeared to be confused about who he was contesting next week’s election against. The Trump campaign and Fox News seized on Biden’s hesitant and stuttering delivery when talking about ‘Four more years of, uh, George’, in an apparent reference to one of the George Bush’s. But all may not be as it initially appears.

In the interview segment, during Biden’s 25 October “I Will Vote” concert, appearing alongside his wife, the 77 year old Democratic nominee says:

“Not because I’m running, but because who I’m running against, this is the most consequential election in a long, long, long tim,” the Democratic nominee says. And the character of the country in my view is literally on the ballot. What kind of country we’re gonna be? Four more years of George, er, George eh... we’re gonna find ourselves in a position where if Trump gets elected we’re going to be in a different world.”

However, Biden supporters have been keen to explain the wider context of the clip – that Joe Biden was in the middle of being interviewed by George Lopez, and that the references to George are simply him responding to the interviewer by name.

In the full sequence, Lopez had just asked Biden why undecided Americans should vote and vote for him.

“He was addressing George Lopez, the interviewer, as is a common practice,” Biden spokesman Andrew Bates said of the row, then referenced Trump’s recent walk out on a 60 Seconds interview recording. “That is, unless, like Donald Trump, you blow a gasket and storm out because you can’t stomach being fact-checked.”

Donald Trump has given this explanation short shrift, tweeting yesterday that “The Fake News Cartel is working overtime to cover it up!”.

Steve Guest, the Republican’s rapid response director also defended his interpretation, telling the Washington Post: “Biden was talking about ‘four more years’ of President Trump and said the name ‘George’ instead. His wife is mouthing ‘Trump’ next to him in an attempt to save him and remind him who is currently president. Which explanation makes more sense? That Biden was expressing concern for 4 years of George Lopez as President.”

With two septuagenarian’s in the race to lead the world’s most powerful nation, the mental acuity of the candidates has been made into a campaign issue. The Trump campaign have repeatedly asserted, without evidence, that Biden has dementia or senility, and that he take performance-enhancing drugs in order to take part in TV debates.

And Trump invited derision upon himself earlier in the year when he explained that being able to remember the phrase ‘Person, woman, man, camera, TV’ was a very difficult part of a cognitive test he had taken.

We’ve got an online event you can take part in later today. Two-time Pulitzer prize winner Bob Woodward will talk about Rage, his revelatory book about the Trump presidency.

During hours of on-the-record interviews and presidential tours of the White House over seven volatile months, Trump talked to Woodward about the pandemic, race relations, the economy and many other subjects relating to his presidency. Rage is a vivid and revealing portrait of the president who, in Woodward’s final line, is “the wrong man for the job”.

As the election approaches, join the veteran investigative reporter to hear his insights of the Trump presidency, its turmoil, contradictions and risks. He’ll be talking to our Washington DC bureau chief, David Smith. In this livestreamed event, you will also have the chance to ask your own questions.

It all starts at 3pm if you are in New York, or 7pm if – like me – you are in London. You can find out more and book tickets here.

Here’s what the Economist has to say about the short, and long-term prospects, of Amy Coney Barrett’s judgements from the US supreme court bench.

Every appointment to America’s Supreme Court ushers in “a new court”, observed Byron White, a justice who welcomed 15 new colleagues in his 31 years on the bench. But rarely does the arrival of a justice herald a transformation as dramatic as that promised by the confirmation on 26 October 26 of Amy Coney Barrett, a deeply conservative judge, to take the seat of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a hero of the progressive legal movement.

Ms Barrett’s rightward influence on the court may be more gradual than conservatives hope and progressives fear. Although the court is not shy about reversing itself on occasion, there is no precedent for erasing a constitutional right it has previously recognised. It would be a stunning about-face for the court to tell gay and lesbian couples their marriages—blessed by a 5-4 majority in 2015—are now null and void. Likewise, fully reneging on abortion rights when half of the country is pro-choice—and tens of millions of women have relied on Roe for nearly half a century—could ignite a firestorm of protest and calls to re-balance a bench that is far out of step with society.

Still, there is little doubt Ms Barrett and her five conservative colleagues will bless more restrictions on abortion, narrow LGBT rights to avoid offending religious people, strengthen the right to bear arms and curtail the autonomy of administrative agencies. With a tenure that could easily stretch past 2050, Ms Barrett has time.

Read more here: The Economist – Amy Coney Barrett is set to transform America’s Supreme Court

The president is awake, and suggesting that people change their already cast mailed-in votes from Democrat to Republican.

Whether that is a wise move seven days out in an election where the Trump administration have been accused of gutting the USPS to slow down votes, and Republicans are actively trying to restrict the counting of mail-in ballots in the courts, well that’s for you to judge.

As Philadelphia experienced unrest last night over a police shooting, and Seattle marked 150 days of protest, Sam Levin in Los Angeles and Maanvi Singh in Phoenix bring us this report today on how, five months after the police killing of George Floyd, hundreds face trials and prison in America’s protest crackdown.

Lee Percy Christian III didn’t think Arizona law enforcement could stop him from protesting – until they locked him up indefinitely. Earlier this month, Christian, 27, was arrested for “unlawful assembly” after a Black Lives Matter protest in Phoenix and jailed without bond because of outstanding charges from previous demonstrations. Prosecutors later suggested bond be set at $100,000. Christian’s lawyers and a judge agreed he could be released on a lower bond – if he didn’t participate in future public protests.

Christian was mortified, but agreed to sign away his right to protests so he could leave jail – he had spent nine days locked up. “I’m guilty until proven innocent,” he said recently on the phone. “We’re in a police state, and the last thing the police want is for me to be out there using my voice.”

Since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, millions of Americans have marched in cities big and small to protests racial violence and police brutality. The demonstrations have been overwhelmingly nonviolent, yet in many jurisdictions law enforcement has responded with force. Tens of thousands of demonstrators, activists and BLM supporters have been arrested.

More than five months since the start of the unrest, hundreds of these protesters have been slapped with serious charges by federal and local prosecutors, according to researchers and a review of court data. Some protesters have faced stacked charges and threats of life sentences. Others have been charged with “assaulting” police officers where there’s no evidence of violence and no reports of injuries. Some arrested protesters have been transferred to immigration authorities.

Read more here: America’s protest crackdown: five months after George Floyd, hundreds face trials and prison

Hundreds protest fatal police shooting of Walter Wallace in Philadelphia

More here on events overnight in Philadelphia where hundreds took to the street to protest at the fatal shooting by police of 27 year old Walter Wallace, a Black man, yesterday.

Video of the confrontation between the police and Wallace recorded by a bystander and posted on social media shows officers pointing their guns at him as he walks in the street and around a car. He walks toward the officers as they back away from him in the street, guns still aimed at him. They yell at him to put his knife down.

Some people spoke with city Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, who arrived at the scene a short time after the shooting occurred, reports the Associated press

“I heard and felt the anger of the community,” Outlaw said in a statement, adding that the video “raises many questions” and that “those questions will be fully addressed by the investigation.”

Wallace’s father, Walter Wallace Sr., told the Philadelphia Inquirer that his son was also a father, was on medication and struggled with mental health issues.

“Why didn’t they use a taser?” he asked. “His mother was trying to defuse the situation. He has mental issues. Why you have to gun him down?”

The shooting occurred before 4pm. as officers responded to a report of a person with a weapon, police spokesperson Tanya Little said. Officers were called to the Cobbs Creek neighborhood and encountered the man who was holding a knife, Little said.

Officers ordered Wallace to drop the knife, but he instead “advanced towards” them. Both officers then fired “several times,” Little said.

People stand near the scene of a police shooting in Philadelphia.
People stand near the scene of a police shooting in Philadelphia. Photograph: Tom Gralish/AP

Wallace was hit in the shoulder and chest. One of the officers then put him in a police vehicle and drove him to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead a short time later, Little said.

One witness told the Inquirer that Wallace was on the street talking to his aunt when he saw police arrive. Wallace had a knife and was standing on the porch of his home, Maurice Holloway said, and officers immediately drew their guns.

Hollaway said Wallace’s mother chased after him as he walked down the steps of his porch, still holding the knife, and then tried to shield Wallace and tell police he was her son.

“I’m yelling, ‘Put down the gun, put down the gun,’ and everyone is saying, ‘Don’t shoot him, he’s gonna put it down, we know him,’” said Holloway, 35 to the paper.

Police handcuff a protester after charging at a crowd gathered at 52nd and Walnut Streets in West Philadelphia.
Police handcuff a protester after charging at a crowd gathered at 52nd and Walnut Streets in West Philadelphia. Photograph: Tim Tai/AP

The Inquirer reports that at least one police vehicle was set on fire Monday night and destroyed, and several police officers were injured by bricks or other objects hurled from the crowd. One officer was hospitalized after getting run over by a speeding truck.

Police charge at a crowd along 52nd Street in West Philadelphia in the early hours of Tuesday.
Police charge at a crowd along 52nd Street in West Philadelphia in the early hours of Tuesday. Photograph: Tim Tai/AP

Mayor Jim Kenney, in a statement Monday night, pledged a full investigation into the shooting that sparked the night. “My prayers are with the family and friends of Walter Wallace,” he said. “I have watched the video of this tragic incident and it presents difficult questions that must be answered. I spoke tonight with Mr. Wallace’s family, and will continue to reach out to hear their concerns firsthand, and to answer their questions to the extent that I am able.”

Reid Wilson offers this analysis for The Hill on why Biden holds a national lead going into the last week of the election campaign: People find him likeable. He also notes this is one of the reasons that 2020 is not a simple re-run of 2016.

At a time when most Americans loathe their political leaders, Biden’s campaign and its outside allies have spent months building their candidate up as empathetic, competent and even likeable.

That strategy has paid off: Polls show more Americans view Biden favorably than unfavorably. A recent Quinnipiac poll found 49 percent saw Biden favorably, while 44 percent viewed him unfavorably. A New York Times survey conducted by Siena College pegged Biden’s favorable rating at 53 percent, and his unfavorable number at 43 percent.

Those numbers are marked contrasts to President Trump, whose favorability ratings are deep underwater. They are also a notable contrast from four years ago, when polls showed just over a third of voters viewed Trump or Hillary Clinton in a favorable light.

“Even at a time of deep partisan polarization, a candidate’s personal image matters. And in many key dimensions, Biden is viewed more positively than Trump, as well as Hillary Clinton in 2016,” said Carroll Doherty, director of political research at the Pew Research Center.

Read more here: The Hill – The secret to Biden’s lead: People find him likable

Our Today in Focus podcast this morning is looking at the US election and asking are Democrats taking black voters for granted in Wisconsin?

Wisconsin has come to play a crucial role in deciding the presidential election. In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama comfortably won there. But in 2016, Donald Trump took the state by a margin of just 23,000 votes. That year, 93,000 black voters in the city of Milwaukee stayed home on election day.

Our reporter Kenya Evelyn grew up in Milwaukee. She recently returned to see how this year’s pandemic, recession and Black Lives Matter protests are shifting the city’s politics.

She tells Mythili Rao what she heard when she spoke to black voters about what this election means to them. The Democrats had expected to hold their convention in Milwaukee – but when the pandemic forced the party to go virtual, an anticipated $200m economic boom instead spiralled into a substantial loss. The pivot was also the final straw for many of the city’s African American residents. Many activists told Evelyn that it could stifle local efforts to solicit enthusiasm for Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris.

Talking of India, Sudarshan Varadhan reports for Reuters this morning from Thulasendrapuram, which he describes as a lush, green south Indian village that is praying for a Democratic Party’s victory in the presidential election. Why? Because the village, located about 320 km (200 miles) south of the city of Chennai, is where Kamala Harris’s maternal grandfather was born more than a century ago. The village is proudly displaying banners of Harris.

A banner Kamala Harris at the entrance to the village of Thulasendrapuram, where Harris’ maternal grandfather was born and grew up.
A banner Kamala Harris at the entrance to the village of Thulasendrapuram, where Harris’ maternal grandfather was born and grew up. Photograph: STAFF/Reuters

Varadhan says residents beam with pride at what the first US senator of South Asian descent has already achieved, and many are rooting for an election result that will make her the second-most powerful person in the world’s richest country.

“From Thulasendrapuram to America”, declares one of the nearly dozen banners from where Harris smiles out in the village. “We, the people of Thulasendrapuram, wish for the electoral success of American vice president nominee Kamala Harris, whose ancestors were a native of Thulasendrapuram.”

Harris’s grandfather P.V. Gopalan and his family migrated to Chennai nearly 90 years ago, where he retired as a high-ranking government official.

The banners, with messages written in Tamil, were put up on the directions of M. Gurunathan, the head of Thulasendrapuram’s village committee that oversees its more than 200 mostly farming families.

“We are really hoping she wins,” said Gurunathan, who is planning to hold a special prayer at the local temple on election day. “The village has received global fame because of her. She is our pride.”

Harris’s name is also seen sculpted into a stone that lists public donations made to the temple, along with that of her grandfather who had donated decades ago. Her aunt offered 5,000 rupees ($67) in her name after she was appointed the attorney general of California, the temple’s caretaker, S.V. Ramanan, said.

Also on a foreign policy front, secretary of state Mike Pompeo is in India at the moment. He has paid respects at the National War Memorial, and then stated India and the United States are cooperating to take on all threats, including China.

“Today is a new opportunity for two great democracies like ours to grow closer,” Pompeo said before the talks with Indian foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and defence minister Rajnath Singh.

“There is much more work to do for sure. We have a lot to discuss today: Our cooperation on the pandemic that originated in Wuhan, to confronting the Chinese Communist Party’s threats to security and freedom to promoting peace and stability throughout the region.*

The two countries have signed an agreement on sharing geospatial data, which Singh has said is a “significant achievement”.

On coronavirus, Pompeo said US companies are making efforts to sell Gilead’s Remdesivir drug to India. India is on course to shortly reach 8 million cases, and has the second highest case count in the world behind the US.

China, perhaps unsurprisingly, has not taken too kindly to Pompeo’s words. Reuters report that Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a news briefing in Beijing. “We urge Pompeo to abandon his Cold War mentality, zero-sum mindset, and stop harping on the ‘China threat’”.

A very quick snap here – an American citizen was kidnapped near the town of Birnin Konni in southern Niger in the early hours of Tuesday morning, three security sources and a local official told Reuters.

The details of the kidnapping were not immediately clear, and no one had claimed responsibility.

Niger is struggling with a security crisis as groups with links to al Qaeda and Islamic State carry out an increasing number of attacks on the army and civilians, particularly in the west region bordering Mali and Burkina Faso. Birnin Konni is a few hundred miles to the east of that region, near the border with Nigeria.

Updated

CNN have a run-down on what Amy Coney Barrett can expect to find in her in-tray as she takes her place on the supreme court. They highlight:

  • Trump taxes case – the justices are primed to decide soon whether a New York prosecutor will get access to Trump’s financial documents from January 2011 to August 2019, including his tax returns. Last July, the Supreme Court, voting 7-2, rejected the President’s broad claims of immunity.
  • Pennsylvania ballot extensions – Republicans in Pennsylvania asked the Supreme Court on Friday to block a ballot receipt extension that would allow them to be counted if they are received within three days of Election Day – even if they do not have a legible postmark.
  • North Carolina ballot counting extension – Republicans in North Carolina are asking the Supreme Court to block a nine-day extension of the counting of ballots if they are received by Election Day and reinstate a three-day extension established by the legislature last June.
  • Minnesota congressional election date – a Republican candidate for Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District is asking the justices to intervene in a case concerning whether his election takes place on November 3 or on February 9, 2021, after the recent death of Legal Marijuana Now Party candidate Adam Weeks caused the contest to be moved to next year as required by state law.
  • Mississippi abortion case – the case pertains to Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, which Republican Gov. Phil Bryant signed into law in 2018. The law made exceptions only for medical emergencies or cases in which there’s a “severe fetal abnormality,” but not for incidents of rape or incest.

Read more here: CNN – Trump’s taxes, election and abortion cases await Amy Coney Barrett in her first week

Even before Amy Cony Barrett takes her seat, there’s a sign of things to come with judgements over the election, as yesterday the supreme court sided with Republicans to prevent Wisconsin from counting mail-in ballots that are received after election day. Maanvi Singh and Sam Levine report:

In a 5-3 ruling, the justices refused to reinstate a lower court order that called for mailed ballots to be counted if they are received up to six days after the 3 November election. A federal appeals court had already put that order on hold.

The ruling awards a victory for Republicans in their crusade against expanding voting rights and access. The three liberal justices dissented. John Roberts, the chief justice, last week joined the liberals to preserve a Pennsylvania state court order extending the absentee ballot deadline but voted the other way in the Wisconsin case, which has moved through federal courts.

“Different bodies of law and different precedents govern these two situations and require, in these particular circumstances, that we allow the modification of election rules in Pennsylvania but not Wisconsin,” Roberts wrote.

“As the Covid pandemic rages, the court has failed to adequately protect the nation’s voters,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissent that noted the state allowed the six-day extension for primary voting in April and that roughly 80,000 ballots were received after the day of the primary election.

Read more here: Wisconsin can’t count mail-in ballots received after election day, supreme court rules

There’s been an understandable focus on the possible impact of seating Amy Coney Barrett on healthcare during a pandemic. But the potential impacts of her ruling on the Affordable Care Act go much further than coronavirus, as Katelyn Burns writes for us today:

Jack Jimenez tried to obtain private health insurance, only to be denied because of a pre-existing condition – his gender dysphoria diagnosis. Jimenez is trans and him living his true identity was reason enough to deny him coverage.

It wasn’t until 2014 when the Affordable Care Act (also known as the comprehensive healthcare reform law and as Obamacare) was implemented, that Jimenez was able to get insurance, the specialist treatment he needed, and a diagnosis because the law eliminated exclusions for pre-existing conditions. It turned out he had pseudotumor cerebri, a condition in which spinal fluid leaks into the skull. The symptoms mimic those of a brain tumor, including vision issues, headaches and ringing in the ears.

“It’s that very first doctor appointment. It’s unbelievable,” he said. “To have people look at you and go, ‘Oh, OK. Yes. I can see why that’s a big concern. Let me write down these three pages of weird symptoms that you’ve been having and let’s do some tests and figure out what the hell is wrong with you,’” he said. “Nobody, nobody had really done that at all.”

Read more here: As the future of Obamacare heads to the supreme court, so does trans rights

Here’s what the New York Times editorial board had to say about the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett:

When she takes her seat on the bench at One First Street, it will represent the culmination of a four-decade crusade by conservatives to fill the federal courts with reliably Republican judges who will serve for decades as a barricade against an ever more progressive nation.

This is not a wild conspiracy theory. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader and one of the main architects of this crusade, gloated about it openly on Sunday, following a bare-majority vote to move Judge Barrett’s nomination to the Senate floor. “A lot of what we’ve done over the last four years will be undone sooner or later by the next election,” Mr. McConnell said. “They won’t be able to do much about this for a long time to come.”

That’s the perfect distillation of what this has been all about. It also reveals what it was never about. It was never about letting the American people have a voice in the makeup of the Supreme Court.

Read more here: New York Times – the Republican party’s supreme court

Away from the election and the supreme court for a moment, California is bracing for another round of fire danger from gusts even as crews battle two southern blazes that have left more than 100,000 under evacuation orders.

Associated Press report that some of the fiercest winds of the fire season drove fires up and down the state Sunday night and Monday before easing, but they were expected to resume overnight and continue into Tuesday morning.

Firefighters work at controlling the spread of the Blue Ridge Fire threatening homes in Yorba Linda, Orange County.
Firefighters work at controlling the spread of the Blue Ridge Fire threatening homes in Yorba Linda, Orange County. Photograph: Étienne Laurent/EPA

Forecasts predicted Santa Ana winds up to 50 to 80 mph (80 to 128 kph) at times over much of Southern California, with some of the strongest gusts howling through Orange County, where two blazes sped through brushy hills near major urban centers.

A fire that broke out around dawn Monday prompted evacuation orders for thousands of homes in the area of Irvine, while a few miles away another blaze did the same in the Yorba Linda area. More than 100,000 people were told to flee the fast-moving flames.


Two firefighters, one 26 and the other 31 years old, were critically injured while battling the larger blaze near Irvine, according to the county’s Fire Authority. They each suffered second- and third-degree burns over large portions of their bodies and were intubated at a hospital, officials said.

Residents are silhouetted as they watch the Blue Ridge Fire burning in Yorba Linda.
Residents are silhouetted as they watch the Blue Ridge Fire burning in Yorba Linda. Photograph: Ringo Chiu/Reuters

Pat McGrath, 78, of Irvine, went to a shelter after a stranger pounded on her door Monday as she made breakfast. The stranger told her about the evacuation orders.

“I just panicked. I started crying,” McGrath, who has no family on the West Coast, told the Los Angeles Times. “I’m cold, I’m hungry, I’m stressed and I don’t know what to do.”

Our US election polls tracker currently has Joe Biden leading in six of the eight states we are closely watching, including Arizona. Our rolling 14-day average of the polls gives Biden the edge in Arizona 3.7 points. A lot of the leads though are well within the margin of error for polling, and so next Tuesday night is going to be tight and tense.

There’s a week to go. Lauren Gambino and Maanvi Singh have been looking for us at the Arizona county that could decide the future of Trump – and America

Maricopa county, which encompasses Arizona’s capital, Phoenix, and blossoming rings of surrounding suburbs, has nearly 4.5 million residents and dominates the state politically. One third of Maricopa residents identify as Latino, according to US census data.

Over the past decade, demographic change, population growth and a cultural shift seen across America’s suburbs has turned this sprawling desert metropolis – a bastion of western conservatism for decades – into one of the most closely watched and fiercely contested presidential battlegrounds in the nation.

“If the president loses Arizona, it’ll be in large part because he lost Maricopa county,” Jeff Flake, the former Arizona senator, told the Guardian.

The Trump administration’s failure to control the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout has hastened the state’s political transformation – driving moderates, independents and even some conservatives away from the Republican party. Flake, a prominent Republican critic of Trump, has endorsed the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, for president along with Cindy McCain, the widow of the late Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential nominee, John McCain.

Arizona has voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election but one since 1952, but polling this year finds Biden with a narrow but steady lead over Trump. While it’s mathematically possible, no Republican has ever won the White House without the state’s 11 electoral votes.

Read more here: The Arizona county that could decide the future of Trump – and America

Ruth Marcus writes for the Washington Post this morning that Amy Coney Barrett joins a court that is largely out of step with the US public – not just on what they think, but literally on how they have voted over the last decades.

The nation is roughly evenly divided politically and has been for decades. Yet the court — now even more so with Barrett’s arrival — is dominated not only by Republican-appointed justices but also by muscularly conservative ones.

The last time the court had a majority of justices nominated by a Democratic president was in 1969, when Abe Fortas resigned. In the years since, Republican presidents have named 15 of 19 justices. That’s right, Democrats have had only four nominees confirmed in the past half-century.

It would be one thing is this were a reflection of Republican electoral dominance. It’s not. During that time, Democrats have won five of 12 presidential elections, and a plurality or majority of the popular vote in two more.

There are now six Republican-nominated justices on the high court, yet during the tenure of every sitting justice, a Republican president has won the popular vote just once — George W. Bush in 2004.

Read more here: Washington Post – Amy Coney Barrett joins a Supreme Court that’s largely out of step with the national consensus

There were contrasting reactions to the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett on the Twitter streams of the two main opponents in next week’s US election. Donald Trump proudly posted a video of the ceremony, with this voiceover saying:

On this October evening, the First Lady and I welcome you to the White House to bear witness to history. In a few moments we will proudly swear in the newest member of the United States supreme court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett. She is one of our nation’s most brilliant legal scholars, and she will make an outstanding justice in the highest court in our land. The American people have been profoundly impressed to learn of her achievements, her compassion, her generosity and faith and her sterling character. Justice Barrett made clear she will issue rulings based solely upon a faithful reading of the law and the constitution as written, not legislate from the bench. Justice Barrett, as you take your oath tonight, the legacy of our ancestors falls to you. The American people put their trust in you, their faith in you, as you take that the task of defending our laws and constitution and this country that we all love.

By contrast, Joe Biden tweeted that the “rushed and unprecedented confirmation” taking place in the middle of an election “should be a stark reminder to every American that your vote matters.”

His full statement on her confirmation specifically addressed the threat that the Democratic party sees in her nomination to the nation’s healthcare provision.

Just a few days after election day next week, the supreme court will hear the case on the Affordable Care Act. While panicked and erratic in mishandling the pandemic, Donald Trump has been crystal clear on one thing — for the past four years, and again just last night on 60 Minutes — he wants to tear down the Affordable Care Act in its entirety and take away your health care and protections for pre-existing conditions.

This goal — the goal of the Republican Party for ten years — was a litmus test in selecting this nominee, regardless of the damage done to the US Senate, to Americans’ faith in the legitimacy of the supreme court, and to our democracy, and regardless of how the Affordable Care Act has protected hundreds of millions of people before and during the pandemic.

But we will not give up. If you want to protect your health care, if you want your voice to be heard in Washington, if you want to say no, this abuse of power doesn’t represent you — then turn out and vote.

Key events so far…

  • Republicans in the US Senate confirmed judge Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court. Donald Trump hosted Barrett for a ceremonial swearing-in outside at the White House, administered by justice Clarence Thomas.
  • In her speech, Barrett said she would conduct her new job “independently of both branches [of government] and of my own preferences”. She thanked the senate for “the confidence you have placed in me”.
  • The vote was a formality, with senators divided almost entirely along party lines, voting 52 to 48 with just one Republican breaking ranks. For Trump, it meant his legacy on judicial appointees is secure. He will have placed three conservative justices on the court, albeit in highly contentious circumstances.
  • Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate cast it as one of the “darkest days in the 231-year history” of the Senate. Addressing his Republican peers, he said: “You may get Barrett on to the supreme court but you will never, never get your credibility back.”
  • Joe Biden said that the “rushed and unprecedented” proceedings “should be a stark reminder to every American that your vote matters.”
  • Twitter has slapped a warning label on a Trump tweet where the president asserts that counting in the election must be completed on 3 November. That is an entirely baseless assertion invented by him, to serve his political purposes. There is nothing in law or precedent requiring a US election count to finish on voting day. By contrast, in law, many states specifically set deadlines for mail-in ballots to arrive and be counted many days after.
  • At his rallies in Pennsylvania, the president again complained that all the media talk about is Covid. Yesterday the US recorded a further 481 deaths and 66,784 new coronavirus cases. The number of daily new cases is currently around 40% higher than it was a fortnight ago. Trump has repeatedly said the nation has rounded the corner. It has not.
  • Dr. Anthony Fauci, said yesterday that “no matter how you look at” the latest surge in Covid-19 cases, “it’s not good news.”
  • In Philadelphia, protesters took to the streets after police killed Walter Wallace Jr, a 27-year-old Black man. Walter Wallace Sr said his son appeared to have been shot 10 times.
  • We’ve got a live online event today. It starts at 3pm if you are in New York, 7pm if you are in London. Legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward will discuss the Trump presidency. You can book tickets here.

I’m Martin Belam taking over for Tom McCarthy – you can get in touch with me here martin.belam@theguardian.com.

Humanity is said to have just 10 years left to start seriously tackling the climate crisis before passing the ‘point of no return’ with multiple-degree temperature increases, rising sea levels and increasingly disastrous wildfires, hurricanes, floods and droughts predicted.

Scientists say the US is far off the path of what is necessary for the nation and the world to avoid catastrophic global heating, particularly as in the past four years Donald Trump has shredded environmental protections for American lands, animals and people.

As part of our climate countdown series, the Guardian’s Emily Holden looks at the issue and examines why the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, calls his rival a ‘climate arsonist’:

The US supreme court has sided with Republicans to prevent Wisconsin from counting mail-in ballots that are received after election day. From our report:

In a 5-3 ruling, the justices on Monday refused to reinstate a lower court order that called for mailed ballots to be counted if they are received up to six days after the 3 November election. A federal appeals court had already put that order on hold.

The ruling awards a victory for Republicans in their crusade against expanding voting rights and access. It also came just moments before the Republican-controlled Senate voted to confirm Amy Coney Barrett, a victory for the right that locks in a conservative majority on the nation’s highest court for years to come.

The ruling is a setback for voting rights in a key battleground state. But some analysts see an even more troubling feature in concurrences to the ruling by two Trump appointees to the court, justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

In their concurrences, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh revive a legal argument from the 2000 showdown Bush v Gore that saw a limited ability for state courts to intervene in elections, such as by ordering a recount, because that could usurp the authority over elections held by a state legislatures.

Given the makeup of some courts, a limited ability to intervene in elections might sound nice. But the extraordinary efforts by Republican-controlled legislatures in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and elsewhere to violate the constitutional guarantee of a right to vote for every person illustrate the need for a check and a balance – the courts.

Power to the states. Except when not.
Power to the states. Except when not. Photograph: Doug Mills/Getty Images

In his concurrence, Gorsuch objects to the Wisconsin court’s intervention to allow the counting of ballots received after election day that were mailed earlier – which with postal service breakdowns, an unusual volume of mail-in ballots, a raging pandemic and the imperative to count every vote (and tradition of doing so) would not seem unreasonable on its face.

“The Constitution provides that state legislatures—not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials—bear primary responsibility for setting election rules,” Gorsuch writes. Then he says that if something goes wrong in an election, Congress can fix it, which shows how far out on the limb of theory he is.

But even more alarming, to some analysts, is Kavanaugh’s concurrence, which in a footnote credits the aforementioned Florida argument about the restrictions on court powers in this area, advanced at the time by chief justice William Rehnquist.

“Under the U. S. Constitution,” Kavanaugh writes, “the state courts do not have a blank check to rewrite state election laws for federal elections.” Heedless of incursions by state legislatures on voting rights and the court’s role in asserting constitutional protections of those writes, Kavanaugh then quotes from Rehnquist:

“In a Presidential election, in other words, a state court’s ‘significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question’.”

A further occasion for alarm in Kavanaugh’s concurrence is his sympathy to Trump’s argument that election results should be announced on election day – an argument that has surfaced this year owing to the huge opportunity for disenfranchisement Republicans have if there is suddenly a Cinderella election in which the whole thing turns into a pumpkin when the clock strikes 12.

Kavanaugh is worried about election “chaos” – not from the mass disenfranchisement of voters, but because suddenly, he argues, it is intolerable to wait hours until vote-counting is completed:

Those States want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election. And those States also want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter. Moreover, particularly in a Presidential election, counting all the votes quickly can help the State promptly resolve any disputes, address any need for recounts, and begin the process of canvassing and certifying the election results in an expeditious manner.

On one hand you have a president doing everything he can to foment a sense of chaos about the election, and on the other you have the justice warning about the intolerable chaos that lurks if states cannot “definitively announce the results of the election on election night.”

In making his point about how states are handling voting during the pandemic smoothly, Kavanaugh advances a basic inaccuracy about election rules in Vermont, Sam Levine notes:

The Vermont secretary of state tweets in confirmation that Kavanaugh is wrong:

Here’s Ronald Klain, who served as general counsel for Al Gore’s ballot recount committee in the climactic 2000 election showdown resolved by the supreme court:

Updated

Twitter has slapped a warning label on a Trump tweet that can only be read as part of Trump’s attempt to steal the current election.

To read the tweet you must click through the warning: “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about how to participate in an election or another civic process.”

In the tweet, sent late Monday, Trump asserts that counting in the election must be completed on 3 November. That is an entirely baseless assertion invented by him, to serve his political purposes.

Counting in US elections always goes after midnight on election day. Three of the past five US presidential elections – in 2000, 2004 and 2016 – were called after midnight on election day.

And this year, elections officials know that the counting of a significant share of votes will go past midnight in heavily Democratic areas in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania. That in part stems from an unusual flow of mail-in ballots amid the pandemic.

So it’s no secret why Trump would want to impose a rule he made up with no grounding in law or precedent on the election: he wants to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of people so he has a chance of winning.

Lady Gaga, whose Twitter feed has recently been given over to an uninterrupted stream of information and advice about how to vote early, puts her ballot where her Twitter is:

It looks like she got to wear an “I voted” sticker before dropping off her ballot? Do they mail those out with ballots in California?

In Philadelphia, protesters took to the streets after police killed Walter Wallace Jr, a 27-year-old Black man.

Walter Wallace Sr told the Inquirer that his son appeared to have been shot 10 times. From the Inquirer:

“Why didn’t they use a Taser?” Wallace Sr asked outside a family residence on the block. “His mother was trying to defuse the situation.”

Wallace Sr said his son struggled with mental health issues and was on medication. “He has mental issues. Why you have to gun him down?”

Police with shields and riot gear attempted to disband a crowd gathered near the police district headquarters. The Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Anna Orso captured a video of officers pushing back at the crowd after some people threw bottles.

Read more here.

Outraged reaction to the 11th-hour confirmation of justice Amy Coney Barrett continues to pour in.

“We have one message,” says Ben Jealous, president of the progressive People For the American Way good-governance group: “vote them out... because they don’t care about you.”

Here’s the full statement from Jealous:

For every American whose home-state senator voted to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, we have one message: vote them out. Vote them out, whether your opportunity comes in the next few days or in two years, because they don’t care about you. Any senator who voted to confirm Barrett voted to undo the Affordable Care Act and protections for preexisting conditions. They voted to disenfranchise millions of people, in the event Donald Trump refuses to accept electoral defeat and seeks help from his appointees on the Supreme Court. They voted to turn back the clock on LGBTQ rights, racial equity, reproductive rights and workers’ rights. But we don’t have to stand for it, because we get the final say at the ballot box. And we will make our voices heard.”

National Education Association president Becky Pringle blasts the senate for moving on a supreme court nominee at a time when “our educators, our students” are reeling:

While we work together in the midst of multiple crises — a historic public health emergency, an economic fallout not seen since the Great Depression, and a social and racial justice reckoning centuries in the making — our educators, our students, our families, and our communities are reeling. Yet Senate Republicans have refused to provide COVID-19 relief that American families desperately need. Instead, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell chose to ram through an extreme nominee who threatens our very health care, our union rights, our voting rights, our civil rights and our students’ rights. We will not forget what Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell have done to stack our courts while ignoring the pressing issues of the country.

Joe Biden has been coy about whether he would support expanding the supreme court in response to the hijacking by conservatives of one seat and their rushed replacement of a second.

Not coy: the president’s niece:

Progressive groups are demanding an expansion of the court for the first time in more than a century, putting pressure on a Biden administration to make it a top priority. It would be great pressure for Biden to be under, in the sense that if he is in position to expand the court, it will have meant that he won the presidency and Democrats won the senate.

Barrett reaction: 'They have lied, cheated, and compromised democracy'

Nan Aron, president of the progressive Alliance for Justice, said Barrett’s confirmation “cemented” a “conservative takeover of the supreme court”.

“They have lied, cheated, and compromised democracy,” Aron said.

Here’s Aron’s full statement, which ends with a call for progressive activists to “to show them everything we have up our sleeves”:

“With the completion of the sham process to confirm Amy Coney Barrett, Republican lawmakers have cemented their conservative takeover of the Supreme Court and lower courts. They have blocked the nominees of Democratic presidents, weakened or broken Senate rules, and abandoned any pretense of scrutinizing the impartiality of their Federalist Society-approved nominees.

“They have lied, cheated, and compromised democracy to secure control for the wealthy and powerful with every intention of turning back the clock on rights and protections for everybody else. They want to take health care away from millions of people, limit access to reproductive care based on zip code, and subject workers to harassment and discrimination. Too many bills to protect Americans and protect our democracy have died in McConnell’s legislative graveyard while Trump’s judges sailed right through.

“Our fight, however, is far from over. We know that their control is illegitimate and far from full-proof. We know that their ideas are as unpopular as ever. And we know that liberals and progressives recognize as clearly as ever how vital the courts will be to advancing our more perfect nation.

“Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg earned the nickname ‘Notorious RBG’ by refusing to compromise on what she knew was right. While Senate Republicans spent the last month knowingly violating her dying wish, we will honor her legacy by using every tool at our disposal to dismantle and disempower the conservative takeover of our courts.

“Republican lawmakers have shown us all of the cards in their rigged deck. Now it’s time to show them everything we have up our sleeves. Game on.”

Hello and welcome to our round-the-clock coverage of the 2020 US presidential election. It’s Tuesday! Just one week to go until election day.

Republicans in the US Senate confirmed judge Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court on Monday evening with only one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, who is in a tough reelection fight, voting against Barrett. Donald Trump hosted Barrett for a ceremonial swearing-in outside at the White House, administered by justice Clarence Thomas.

“This is a very special and important ceremony,” Trump said, in a speech that explicitly framed Barrett as a victory in generational culture war. “We are fulfilling the duty that passes to each new generation to sustain the national traditions and virtues that make possible everything before that.”

Joe Biden said that the “rushed and unprecedented” proceedings “should be a stark reminder to every American that your vote matters.” The full statement is here. Read our previous blog for further news and reaction.

Donald Trump made three stops in the battleground state of Pennsylvania yesterday, and Joe Biden paid an unscheduled visit there. We’ll have a lot from the campaign trail today. Thanks for joining us!

Updated

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