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

Biden and Obama to campaign in battleground state Michigan as election day nears – as it happened

Barack Obama in Orlando, Florida, on 27 October.
Barack Obama in Orlando, Florida, on 27 October. Photograph: Octavio Jones/Getty Images

The Guardian’s Tom McCarthy will continue live coverage of the US elections. Follow along here:

Summary

Here’s a look at today so far, from me and my colleagues Joan E Greve, Miranda Byrant and Sam Levine:

  • Protests continued as more details emerged on Wednesday about the police killing of 27-year-old Walter Wallace in Philadelphia. Mayor Jim Kenney, announced a curfew from 9pm until 6am Thursday.
  • The US supreme court denied two Republican efforts to limit which absentee ballots will be counted. The court rejected a last-minute plea from Pennsylvania Republicans to overturn a three-day extension of the absentee ballot deadline. It also declined to block an agreement giving North Carolina voters more time to return their absentee ballots, the latest in a series on important rulings on absentee ballots in key swing states.
  • Both campaigns held events in Phoenix, Arizona in what has become a hotly contested election battleground. While Trump held a packed rally, Kamala Harris hosted a drive-in event. Read the Guardian’s series Phoenix Rising, to learn more about why the city – and its surrounding suburbs – is undergoing a political transformation.
  • Barack Obama campaigned with Joe Biden in the battleground state of Michigan on Saturday, just three days before election day. This will be the first joint in-person campaign appearance of Biden and Obama since Biden won the Democratic presidential nomination.
  • The US stock markets took another hit, as coronavirus cases continued to surge across the country. The Dow Jones closed down 942 points, or 3.4%, which appeared to be the worst drop since June.
  • The CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter testified before the Senate on section 230, a federal law that provides liability protections to internet companies. The hearing comes as Republicans have accused social media platforms of censorship, allegations that the CEOs have ardently denied.
  • Trump once again complained about the extensive news coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, which has already claimed more than 226,000 American lives. “Covid, Covid, Covid is the unified chant of the Fake News Lamestream Media,” the president said in a tweet this morning. Campaigning for Biden in Florida yesterday, Barack Obama accused Trump of being “jealous of Covid’s media coverage”.
  • The identity of “Anonymous”, the Trump administration official who penned a critical op-ed about the president in 2018, was revealed. Former DHS chief of staff Miles Taylor, who went public with his criticism of Trump in August, said he had written the New York Times op-ed. “I believe more than ever that Trump unbound will mean a nation undone,” Taylor said in a statement revealing his identity.

Updated

“We can’t vote in San Quentin prison. So we held a mock election”

Juan Haines and Kevin Sawyer , both incarcerated journalists at San Quentin prison, report:

“I want to be heard,” one man wrote on the back of a makeshift ballot in a simulated election held inside San Quentin state prison. Another wrote that he was voting because “I’d like to feel like a citizen; feel like I am important too.”

The total population of US prisons and jails is greater than all but four American cities. But with a few exceptions (Maine, Vermont and now Washington DC), citizens held in state and federal prisons cannot participate in the democratic process. In California, even people on parole cannot vote, though a measure called Proposition 17 could change that this year. The thousands of men in San Quentin do not worry about violence at polling places or missing mail-in ballots. We know from the start that our votes won’t count.

At least 1,600 men spend more than 23 hours a day locked inside windowless, 4ft x 10ft cells. The unventilated housing units, five tiers high, have their windows welded shut – perfect environments for the coronavirus to thrive. There have been more than 2,200 confirmed cases at San Quentin – three-quarters of the prison’s total population – and 28 incarcerated men have died.

Some of the men incarcerated here were nonetheless given a chance to make their choices – and their voices – known through a mock election. The mock election goal: poll those held in the general population in north block and west block, who represent about 85% of the total population. To make it happen, on 1 October, Solitary Watch, which is collaborating with the Guardian to support our election and publish our story, mailed 800 ballots to north block and 800 more to west block. The ballots, delivered via express mail, have been sitting in the prison mailroom since 2 October. Calls from Solitary Watch went unanswered.

It was under these circumstances that 150 handmade ballots were passed out in north block on 10 October. Three days later, 170 more were smuggled into west block, accompanied by a note that read: “Since CDCR [California department of corrections and rehabilitation] is holding the ballots, we have to improvise.”

Read more:

After Ice Cube garnered headlines for his tweets announcing a collaboration with the Trump administration on what was called a Platinum Plan for Black America, the hip-hop mogul faced immediate backlash for supposed hypocrisy and misogyny.

Kenya Evelyn reports:

“Black men are breaking my heart with this caping for [Ice Cube and the president]. Apparently y’all want to be to 2020 what White women were to 2016,” tweeted scholar Brittney Cooper.

Political analysts also chided the rapper for failing to admit that he declined invitations to meet with both the Joe Biden campaign and Kamala Harris.

The Los Angeles-based rapper neither disavowed working with nor endorsed the president, but the illusion of aligning with Trump allowed campaign officials to signal Ice Cube was proof of “Blaxit” – an initiative calling for the exodus of Black Americans from the Democratic party.

50 Cent encouraged followers to “vote for Trump” after posting that Biden’s proposed tax plan only amplified criticism. He’s since dialed back his support. The sometime rapper faced a mountain of criticism for claiming he doesn’t “care Trump doesn’t like Black people” in the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election.

Rosa Clemente, an activist and former Green party vice-presidential nominee, argued that these celebrity interventions run counter to existing, youth- and women-led initiatives fighting for institutional change.

“They’re right to critique the Democratic party, where they’re wrong is to act like there aren’t already movements out here,” she said. “We don’t need another Black agenda. Yet here come these rappers over the age of 50 who’ve publicly decided to align with a white supremacist”.

Read more:

Federal agencies have warned that cybercriminals are working to interfere with the US healthcare system that protects hospital information systems nationwide, the AP reports:

In a joint alert Wednesday, the FBI and two federal agencies warned that they had “credible information of an increased and imminent cybercrime threat to U.S. hospitals and healthcare providers.” The alert said malicious groups are targeting the sector with attacks that produce “data theft and disruption of healthcare services.”

The cyberattacks involve ransomware, which scrambles data into gibberish that can only be unlocked with software keys provided once targets pay up. Independent security experts say it has already hobbled at least five U.S. hospitals this week, and could potentially impact hundreds more.

The offensive by a Russian-speaking criminal gang coincides with the U.S. presidential election, although there is no immediate indication they were motivated by anything but profit. “We are experiencing the most significant cyber security threat we’ve ever seen in the United States,” Charles Carmakal, chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm Mandiant, said in a statement.

Read more here.

Updated

More than 75.7 million Americans have already voted in the election, according to the US Elections Project.

With six days to go until election day, more than 25.6m voted in person, and more than 50m absentee ballots were returned. The record-breaking early voting numbers are putting the country on pace to achieve the highest voter participation rate it has seen in more than a century.

The coronavirus death toll in US topped 1,000 today

States reported 1m tests, about 79,000 new cases, and 1,025 deaths, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

If Biden wins what would the first 100 days of his presidency look like?

Daniel Strauss and Julian Borger report from Washington:

If Joe Biden wins the 2020 US election against Donald Trump next week, the new president-elect will face enormous pressures to implement a laundry list of priorities on a range of issues from foreign policy to the climate crisis, reversing many of the stark changes implemented by his predecessor.

But Biden’s first and most pressing task for his first 100 days in the White House would be to roll out a new nationwide plan to fight the coronavirus crisis, which has claimed more than 220,000 lives in the US and infected millions – more than any other country in the world – as well as taking steps to fix the disastrous economic fallout.

And, while the new president might be fresh from victory, the moderate Biden will also have to wrangle with his own side – a Democratic party with an increasingly influential liberal wing, hungry for major institutional changes to try to answer some of the most urgent questions over the country’s future.

“He basically has to do something historic,” said Saikat Chakrabarti, a Democratic activist and former chief of staff to the progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “He’s being handed a depression, a pandemic, and he’s being elected on a mandate to actually solve this stuff and do something big.”

Read more:

The Trump administration has announced it will lift protections in Alaska’s Tongass national forest, permitting logging in the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest.

Cassidy Randall reports:

Experts call the Tongass the “lungs of the country” and one of nation’s last remaining bulwarks against climate change. Located on the southern coast of Alaska, it is made up of centuries-old western cedar, hemlock and Sitka spruce trees, and is home to immense biodiversity, including the largest-known concentration of bald eagles.

“It’s ironic that this administration is trying to tout this president’s environmental record when [Trump is] unwinding environmental safeguards all over the place,” said Ken Rait, project director of the Pew Charitable Trust, who two decades ago helped win the protections that Donald Trump is now undoing. “And lifting protections on the Tongass, the nation’s flagship forest, is about the most egregious of all of them.”

The administration’s decision ignores overwhelming public support for keeping protections in place on the Tongass, including resolutions from six south-east Alaska tribes and six south-east Alaska city councils against lifting protections. Of the public comments solicited on the plan, 96% were in favor of keeping protections in places.

Tribes also petitioned the government to protect customary cultural use areas of the Tongass. “All other avenues to protect our homelands have been exhausted, to little avail,” they wrote in their petition.

Read more:

Republican senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, a Trump loyalist who is fighting to hold onto her seat, claimed she was “not familiar” with the infamous Access Hollywood tape that caught Donald Trump boasting about sexual assault.

“I rank as the most conservative senator in the US Senate,” she told supporters today. “I’m the only US senator that has voted 100% with President Trump.”

Her claim – that she’s never heard of a scandal that dominated national news during the 2016 presidential election – is highly suspect.

Loeffler, who has to fend off 20 challengers this election, is tied for second place in many polls with Republican representative Doug Collins. Democrat Raphael Warnock, a pastor, has maintained a lead over both Republicans in recent polls.

Updated

Tucker Carlson, the Trump loyalist and Fox News host who has been stirring up controversy with unsubstantiated and unverified claims about the Bidens, said he lost some “damning” documents in the mail. “Those documents have vanished,” Carlson said.

Ridicule of his highly suspect, “dog ate my damning documents” excuse ensued:

Updated

Both presidential campaigns held events in Phoenix today, in what has become a hotly contested political battleground.

While Trump held one of his classic, packed, maskless rallies – the Biden campaign organized a drive-in event. Kamala Harris told her crowd she’d deliver “straight talk” in the spirit of John McCain, the late Republican senator of Arizona.

“Arizona has a longstanding reputation for no BS,” she said.

Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix, could help decide the fate of this election. Read more:

Updated

Here’s some more analysis of that US supreme court decision to reject a last-minute plea from Pennsylvania Republicans to overturn a three-day extension of the absentee ballot deadline.

Sam Levine, the Guardian’s voting rights expert, reports:

Pennsylvania usually requires ballots to arrive by 8pm on election night in order to count. But last month, the state supreme court extended that deadline by three days for ballots postmarked by election day, a move likely to allow thousands of late-arriving ballots to count.

Pennsylvania Republicans asked the US supreme court to halt that ruling pending appeal, but it declined to do so last week, deadlocking 4-4 and offering no explanation for its decision. The Pennsylvania Republican party then asked the court to expedite the case, which the court again declined to do on Wednesday.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who formally joined the court this week, did not participate in the case because the case needed to be resolved quickly and she did not have time to review the briefings in the case, the supreme court’s public information office said in a statement.

Despite Wednesday’s ruling, three of the court’s conservative justices – Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas – signaled the court may still consider the case after the election. The Pennsylvania supreme court’s ruling “likely violates the federal constitution”, Alito wrote for the three, and its decision “could lead to serious post-election problems”. Pennsylvania’s top election official also instructed counties to segregate ballots that arrived after 8pm on election day from ones that arrived before.

The three conservative justices also voiced support for the view that state supreme courts have limited authority to second-guess legislatures on rules for federal elections, a view justice Brett Kavanaugh voiced on Monday. That view could come into play in post-election disputes in states like North Carolina and Pennsylvania –which have Republican controlled-legislatures but Democratic majorities on the supreme court. In the future, the lack of oversight from state courts could give state lawmakers far more leeway to pass laws that make it harder to vote.

Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in a blogpost that he was skeptical that the court would throw out late arriving ballots after the election given that Pennsylvania voters are being instructed that they do not have to return their ballots by election day in order to have them count.

“Without Roberts and Kavanaugh going along, even if justice Barrett participated in future cases, there would not be five justices to throw out those ballots. It is still a theoretical possibility, however, especially with ballots now being segregated between those arriving by the original statutory deadline and later ballots,” he wrote. “Hopefully the election will not be close enough in either PA or the electoral college and the issue becomes moot in this election.”

In Washington DC, protestors demanded justice for 20-year-old Karon Hylton.

Hylton’s friends and family said the police chased and hit him, killing him. A friend of his told WAMU, “I saw police chasing him everywhere, for no reason.”

“I saw Karon stop at the intersection of Fifth Street and also ask them, ‘Why are y’all still chasing me?’” the friend said. “They chased him. They chased him to death.”

Police said Hylton was riding a Revel electric moped without a helmet. He was taken to the hospital after officers stopped him and was pronounced dead.

Updated

Supreme court rejects Republican efforts to shorten deadlines for mail-in ballots

Sam Levine reports:

The US supreme court declined on Wednesday to block an agreement giving North Carolina voters more time to return their absentee ballots, the latest in a series on important rulings on absentee ballots in key swing states.

North Carolina state law allows voters to return ballots three days after election day as long as they are postmarked by election day. But earlier, the North Carolina state board of elections, the top elections body in the state, agreed to extend that deadline by nine days, until 12 November, in an effort to settle a lawsuit. North Carolina Republicans, who control the state legislature, challenged that extension and had asked the supreme court to overturn it.

The court offered no explanation for its decision in the case, which is not unusual for cases, like the North Carolina one, that come before it on an emergency basis. Conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas all said they would have blocked the extension. Writing on behalf of the three, Gorsuch said the state board had exceeded its authority. He noted the state legislature has the power to set election rules and had issued a series of changes earlier this year, but left the ballot receipt deadline intact.

The decision was announced shortly after a similar decision on Wednesday in which the justices declined to halt an extension of the ballot receipt deadline in Pennsylvania, another key swing state. Earlier this week, the court stepped in and blocked a 6 day extension of the ballot receipt deadline in Wisconsin. Both the North Carolina and Pennsylvania cases, where the court declined to intervene, involved disputes over state law tied up in state courts. In Wisconsin, where the court did intervene, the case was limited to the federal court.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who only formally joined the court this week, did not participate in the case.

Updated

In Minneapolis, a campaigner for Donald Trump called on retired officers to patrol “problem areas”, according to a report from the Star Tribune.

Libor Jany of the Star Tribune reports:

The Minneapolis police union put out a call this week for retired officers to help guard polling sites in “problem” areas across Minneapolis on Election Day, at the behest of an attorney for President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, who said the officers would be acting as “our eyes and ears in the field” to call out potential voter fraud.

The request was made by William Willingham, whose e-mail signature identifies him as a senior legal adviser and director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign.

In an e-mail Wednesday morning to Minneapolis Police Federation President Lt. Bob Kroll, Willingham asked the union president about recruiting 20-30 former officers to serve as “poll challengers” to work either a 4- or 8-hour shift in a “problem area.”

“Poll Challengers do not ‘stop’ people, per se, but act as our eyes and ears in the field and call our hotline to document fraud,” the e-mail read. “We don’t necessarily want our Poll Challengers to look intimidating, they cannot carry a weapon in the polls due to state law ... we just want people who won’t be afraid in rough neighborhoods or intimidating situations.”

Kroll then passed on the request to federation members, saying “Please share, and email me if you are willing to assist,” according to a copy obtained by the Star Tribune.

Neither Willingham nor Kroll responded to requests for comment Wednesday. The Trump campaign’s call for retired police officers comes amid rising concerns about voter suppression tactics and confrontations.

The email was sent on the same day Gov. Tim Walz and three former Minnesota governors released a public service video warning that the vote-counting could take longer than usual and calling for “civility and decency.”

Read more on the Star Tribune’s website, here.

Updated

Philadelphia issues a curfew as protests against police brutality continue

Protests continued as more details emerged on Wednesday about the police killing of 27-year-old Walter Wallace in Philadelphia after his family had called for medical assistance when he was having a mental health crisis.

Civil rights campaigners fiercely questioned the way police departments handle members of the public suffering a mental health problem, not just in relation to the shooting of Wallace but across the US.

Hundreds took to the streets of the Pennsylvania city for a second night of protests on Tuesday in the wake of Monday’s shooting, and demonstrations were also held in New York.

Relatives of Wallace have called for calm after peaceful protests deteriorated late on Tuesday night into outbreaks of violence.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominees for president and vice-president, issued a statement about Wallace’s killing, where they said: “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.”

Wallace was described by relatives as suffering from a mental breakdown, but a call for help, where they requested an ambulance, not police, ended in a deadly confrontation with law enforcement after reports that the man had a knife.

Marchers on Monday and Tuesday nights chanted Wallace’s name and demanded racial justice and equality. The killing became the latest flash point in the US amid months of largely peaceful protests that reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter movement against structural racism and police brutality.

The mayor of Philadelphia, Jim Kenney, on Wednesday announced a curfew from 9pm until 6am Thursday.

In a series that the Guardian launched this week, my colleague Lauren Gambino and I take a look at why Trump is campaigning so hard in Phoenix and its surrounding suburbs.

One reason: Maricopa – which includes Phoenix – is the fastest-growing county in the US. Of its nearly 4.5 million residents, one-third identify as Latino, according to census data.

While Arizona has voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election but one since 1952, this year, political strategists and pollsters are predicting that Latino voters in Maricopa could play a decisive role in electing Joe Biden to the White House and Democrats up and down the ballot.

The forces that have made Maricopa county and Arizona such a hotly contested election battleground this year were set in motion more than a decade ago, by a generation of young, progressive Latino activists who mobilized against the hardline immigration policies and Joe Arpaio, the rightwing Maricopa county sheriff who became known as “the Donald Trump of Arizona

Read more:

In Phoenix, Brexit party leader Nigel Farage made a guest appearance at the Trump rally.

“I was honored to come to America to bring the Brexit message – the message that you can beat the establishment,” he said.

Trump “beat the pollsters, he beat the media, he beat all the predictions”, Farage continued.

Updated

The inspector general for the Small Business Administration (SBA), a federal agency, released a report today that said the agency potentially gave billions of dollars in loans to fraudulent small businesses. Through the CARES Act, $375 billion was set aside for loans to small businesses, largely to ensure that employees could be kept on payroll.

The report said that the agency “lowered the guardrails” for receiving a loan in effort to ensure that small businesses were getting the loans quickly. This “significantly increases the risk of program fraud”.

The inspector general found that the SBA approved over $14 billion in loans to bank accounts that were different from accounts that were originally listed on loan applications. Over $62 billion was given to multiple applicants that used the same IP address, email address, bank account or address.

Over the last few months, stories of fraud from the program, including one man who bought a luxury car with money from the program, have started to trickle. By September, the justice department had charged 57 people with trying to steal $175 million in fraudulent loans.

I’m signing off and handing the blog over to my Guardian colleague Maanvi Singh. Stay tuned for more live updates.

Updated

A little bit from Donald Trump’s rally that’s happening now in Phoenix. Apparently Trump and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky declared cheers to “immunity” since both men have contracted Covid-19.

And masks are unsurprisingly scarce even as cases in the state, and many parts of the country, rise.

Updated

Donald Trump is at a campaign rally, his second of the day, in Phoenix. Amid his usual campaign ramblings, he is going after Miles Taylor, saying that the former DHS chief of staff is a “sleaze-bag” who should be prosecuted.

Republican Voters Against Trump just tweeted another ad from a “life-long Republican” who has switched loyalties to Joe Biden, this time from the former “lead staffer for Hispanic engagement” for the president’s 2016 campaign.

“I thought that the Trump campaign posed a unique opportunity to help the American people … but what I came to realize was that the campaign was a vile, self-serving branding exercising for one man and his family,” said Jessica Denson, the former campaign staffer.

In the minute-long ad, Denson details how Trump is “an enemy of free speech” as evidenced by the nondisclosure agreements that the campaign had over staffers who were seeking to speak out against the president. “They’ve spent upward of a million dollars trying to keep my story from the American people,” she said.

Updated

A prominent Philadelphia activist was arrested by federal authorities at his home this morning, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Officials have not released information on what specific charges he is facing.

Anthony Smith is a social studies teacher and a local organizer for racial justice. He was recently profiled with fellow activists in Philadelphia Magazine, and listed as one of the most influential people in the city.

The Inquirer reports that US district attorney William McSwain will hold a press conference tomorrow to detail indictments related to “police vehicle arson cases” from protests that took place in May and June in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd.

As a result of protests that roiled cities across the country in the summer, Donald Trump has unrolled a “law and order” strategy that is meant to convince voters that crime is a threat and that the largely peaceful protests were violent. William Barr, US attorney general, has taken this strategy to heart, instructing US prosecutors in September to explore aggressive charges against people at recent demonstrations.

Updated

Donald Trump has responded to Miles Taylor, the former DHS official who outed himself as the anonymous author of a critical New York Times op-ed on the administration.

Earlier, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said that Taylor is a “disgruntled former staff” who is a “liar and a coward”.

Trump’s response: “I don’t know him – never even heard of him.” A rant focused on the media and tech follows.

Updated

Supreme court denies Republican push to expedite mail-in voting case

The supreme court just released a decision denying a request to speed up an appeal for a case on mail-in voting. Last week, the court allowed the state to count ballots that are received after election day, so long as the ballots are postmarked by election day and received in the following three days. Pennsylvania Republicans originally brought the issue to court.

For last week’s 4-4 ruling, chief justice John Roberts joined the court’s three liberal justices. Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined those four for today’s ruling.

Pennsylvania typically requires mail-in ballots to arrive by election night, but the state’s supreme court extended the deadline by three days, citing postal service delays due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Updated

This is Lauren Aratani taking over for Joan E Greve.

Former Republican senator Jeff Flake is the star of a new ad for Joe Biden’s campaign aimed at conservative voters.

Standing in what appears to be a field of cacti in his home state of Arizona, Flake says that though he has never voted for a Democrat for president, “principal and conscience require me to do just that”.

Flake talks to his “fellow Republicans” in the video, saying: “It’s not easy going against the head of our party. Believe me, I know. But I also know that character, moral leadership and integrity are values that we cannot put aside when we cast our vote for president.”

He goes on to say that voting for Biden does not mean shirking conservative values as the most conservative thing a person can do this year is “putting country over party”.

Updated

Today so far

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

Here’s where the day stands so far:

  • Barack Obama will campaign with Joe Biden in the battleground state of Michigan on Saturday, just three days before election day. This will be the first joint in-person campaign appearance of Biden and Obama since Biden won the Democratic presidential nomination.
  • The US stock markets took another hit, as coronavirus cases continued to surge across the country. The Dow Jones closed down 942 points, or 3.4%, which appeared to be the worst drop since June.
  • The CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter testified before the Senate on section 230, a federal law that provides liability protections to internet companies. The hearing comes as Republicans have accused social media platforms of censorship, allegations that the CEOs have ardently denied.
  • Trump once again complained about the extensive news coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, which has already claimed more than 226,000 American lives. “Covid, Covid, Covid is the unified chant of the Fake News Lamestream Media,” the president said in a tweet this morning. Campaigning for Biden in Florida yesterday, Barack Obama accused Trump of being “jealous of Covid’s media coverage”.
  • The identity of “Anonymous”, the Trump administration official who penned a critical op-ed about the president in 2018, was revealed. Former DHS chief of staff Miles Taylor, who went public with his criticism of Trump in August, said he had written the New York Times op-ed. “I believe more than ever that Trump unbound will mean a nation undone,” Taylor said in a statement revealing his identity.

Lauren will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

Updated

Joe Biden shared a photo of him and his wife voting early in Delaware earlier today.

After delivering a speech on the coronavirus pandemic and the Affordable Care Act, the Democratic nominee voted by appointment in his home state.

The Bidens joined more than 75 million Americans who have already cast their ballots in the election, according to the US Elections Project.

Trump similarly voted early in person in Florida over the weekend, even though the president has voted by mail in other recent elections.

Donald Trump leaves the polling station after casting his ballot in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Donald Trump leaves the polling station after casting his ballot in West Palm Beach, Florida. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

US stock markets take another hit as coronavirus cases surge

The US stock markets took another hit today, as coronavirus cases surged across the country and the hopes of a deal on a relief bill dwindled even further.

The Guardian’s Graeme Wearden reports:

Rather than recovering, Wall Street headed even lower in the final minutes of trading.

The Dow Jones industrial average has closed down 942 points, or 3.4%, at 26,520 - which looks to be the worst drop since June.
The S&P 500 shed 3.5%, while the tech-focused Nasdaq tumbled by 3.7% Rising Covid-19 case numbers in the US, and globally, drove stocks lower as investors worried that the lockdowns in Germany and France will hurt the global recovery....and perhaps be replicated in the US.

A new national poll found Biden has a 12-point lead among likely voters, with less than a week to go until election day.

According to the CNN poll, 54% of likely voters in the US support Biden, while 42% support Trump.

That result is slightly above the FiveThirtyEight average of national polls, which shows Biden has roughly a 9-point national lead over Trump.

Of course, the results in individual battleground states will matter far more than the national popular vote because the electoral college determines the winner of the election.

However, it would be almost impossible for Trump to pull off an electoral college victory if he is trailing nationally by double digits, and polls of major battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin also show Biden ahead by several points.

There are just six days to go until election day, and more than 75 million Americans have already cast their ballots, according to the US Elections Project.

The White House lashed out against Miles Taylor after the former DHS chief of staff was revealed to be the anonymous administration official who penned a critical op-ed about the president in 2018.

“President Trump is focused on leading the great American comeback and keeping his promises to the American people. This low-level, disgruntled former staffer is a liar and a coward who chose anonymity over action and leaking over leading,” press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement.

“The American people elected President Trump to carry out his vision for the country, not an arrogant deep state operative trying to put their agenda ahead of the President’s America First policies.”

Shortly after the op-ed was published in the New York Times, Trump sent a one-word tweet saying, “TREASON?”

It’s important to remember that, as a senior official in the department of homeland security under Trump, Miles Taylor played a key role in overseeing the president’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy.

That policy resulted in the separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents, and officials still cannot locate the parents of 545 separated children.

Some reporters criticized the New York Times for offering Taylor an anonymous platform as he publicly defended the administration’s widely criticized immigration policies.

Miles Taylor denied knowledge of the identity of “Anonymous” in August, shortly after he went public with his criticism of Trump.

In an interview with CNN, Taylor dismissed the importance of discovering the identity of “Anonymous,” saying it had become a “parlor game” in Washington to guess who the secret administration official was.

Asked directly be CNN anchor Anderson Cooper whether he was “Anonymous,” Taylor replied, “I wear a mask for two things, Anderson: Halloween and pandemics. So, no.”

Miles Taylor confirmed he was “Anonymous,” saying in a Medium post that he viewed his criticism of Trump as a moral imperative.

Taylor writes in his post:

We do not owe the President our silence. We owe him and the American people the truth.

Make no mistake: I am a Republican, and I wanted this President to succeed. That’s why I came into the Administration with John Kelly, and it’s why I stayed on as Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security. But too often in times of crisis, I saw Donald Trump prove he is a man without character, and his personal defects have resulted in leadership failures so significant that they can be measured in lost American lives. ...

Much has been made of the fact that these writings were published anonymously. The decision wasn’t easy, I wrestled with it, and I understand why some people consider it questionable to levy such serious charges against a sitting President under the cover of anonymity. But my reasoning was straightforward, and I stand by it. Issuing my critiques without attribution forced the President to answer them directly on their merits or not at all, rather than creating distractions through petty insults and name-calling. I wanted the attention to be on the arguments themselves.

Identity of 'Anonymous' Trump administration official revealed

The identity of “Anonymous,” the Trump administration official who detailed “a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first” in a 2018 op-ed, has been revealed.

The New York Times reports:

Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, was the anonymous author of The New York Times Op-Ed article in 2018 whose description of President Trump as ‘impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective’ roiled Washington and set off a hunt for his identity, Mr. Taylor confirmed Wednesday.

Mr. Taylor was also the anonymous author of ‘A Warning,’ a book he wrote the following year that described the president as an ‘undisciplined’ and ‘amoral’ leader whose abuse of power threatened the foundations of American democracy. He acknowledged that he was the author of both the book and the opinion article in an interview and in a three-page statement he intended to post online.

Taylor went public with his criticism of the president in August, with an ad from the group Republican Voters Against Trump, in which he endorsed Biden.

In the ad, Taylor accused Trump of trying to “exploit the Department of Homeland Security for his own political purposes and to fuel his own agenda.”

Taylor said, “Given what I experienced in the administration, I have to support Joe Biden for president.”

House speaker Nancy Pelosi provided an update on the negotiations over a coronavirus relief bill, in an interview this afternoon with MSNBC.

The Democratic speaker expressed hope that Trump would be incentivized to reach a deal on a relief package after seeing the stock markets’ recent downturn.

Pelosi noted she is still waiting for a response from the Trump administration on accepting Democrats’ bill language on developing a national coronavirus testing strategy.

The president said yesterday that he expected to pass a relief bill after election day. “After the election, we will get the best stimulus package you have ever seen,” Trump told reporters.

The Guardian’s Kenya Evelyn reports:

Black Americans could decide the 2020 presidential election, particularly in key battleground states like Wisconsin and Florida. The battle for the White House approaches as Black Americans face the brunt of an unprecedented national crisis – one in 1,000 have died of the virus and African Americans are twice as likely to have lost a job.

Joe Biden’s road to the White House could hang on Democrats’ ability to turn out their most loyal bloc.

Although they have maintained a sizable advantage among African Americans over Republicans counterparts for decades, support for Democrats has slowly declined since the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency. That complicates Democratic efforts to court these 30 million eligible voters ahead of 3 November.

African Americans are often depicted as a single, unified bloc, and many analysts warn Democrats that therein lies the problem. As experts debunk the myth of the Black voter monolith, the path to victory may be dependent on Democrats’ ability to speak to Black voters’ diversity.

Here are factors that will shape Black voting turnout on election day, and their political power well beyond:

Trump suggested he wanted courts to stop states from counting votes after election day, even though the tabulation of ballots is often a days-long process for election officials.

“We’ll see what happens at the end of [election day],” Trump said at his press conference in Las Vegas this afternoon.

“Hopefully it won’t go longer than that. Hopefully the few states remaining that want to take a lot of time after November 3rd to count ballots, that won’t be allowed by the various courts,” the president added.

In reality, states officially have until December 8 (known as the “safe harbor” deadline) to tabulate their final election results.

Several polls of battleground states were just released, so the blog is going to sum them up.

First up is Georgia, where Biden has pulled slightly ahead of Trump, according to Monmouth University.

A new Monmouth poll found that Biden has a 5-point advantage over Trump among Georgia’s registered voters, 50%-45%. Biden’s lead among the state’s likely voters shrinks to between 2 and 4 points, depending on the level of turnout, which means Biden’s likely voter lead is within the poll’s margin of error.

Trump won Georgia by 5 points in 2016, and the president almost certainly must win the state again in order to secure a second term.

Two other polls also showed Biden leading in the Midwestern battleground states of Wisconsin and Michigan, both of which Trump won by less than 1 point in 2016.

According to a New York Times/Siena College poll, Biden leads Trump by 8 points among likely voters in Michigan, 49%-41%.

A new Marquette Law School poll also found Biden has a 5-point advantage among likely voters in Wisconsin, 48%-43%. That is a very different result from the Washington Post-ABC News poll of Wisconsin released this morning, which showed Trump trailing Biden by 17 points among likely voters in the state, 57%-40%.

Reminder: we are just six days from election day.

Trump predicts he will 'over-perform' in election as he trails in polls

Trump predicted he would “over-perform” on election day, as polls show him trailing nationally and in key battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“I’m calling it a ‘great red wave,’ and I think you’re going to see something that’s going to be amazing,” Trump said at his press conference in Las Vegas.

“I think on Tuesday, we’re going to over-perform,” the president added.

FiveThirtyEight currently gives Trump a 12% chance of winning reelection, and the president is trailing Biden in national polls by an average of about 9 points.

Trump is now holding a press conference at his Las Vegas hotel, before he heads to Arizona for two campaign rallies today.

Donald Trump walks out to speak to the media at Trump International Hotel Las Vegas.
Donald Trump walks out to speak to the media at Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

The president used the unexpected press conference to spotlight endorsements from several Nevada business groups, such as the Nevada Trucking Association and the Retail Association of Nevada.

Trump also took the opportunity to dispute a new Washington Post-ABC News poll that showed him trailing Biden by 17 points among likely voters in Wisconsin, 57%-40%.

The president claimed he had an internal poll showing him leading by 1 point in Wisconsin. The FiveThirtyEight polling average of Wisconsin shows Biden up by about 8 points.

Biden and Obama to campaign together in Michigan

Joe Biden and Barack Obama will campaign together in the swing state of Michigan on Saturday, just three days before election day.

“On Saturday, October 31, President Obama will join Joe Biden in Michigan to discuss bringing Americans together to address the crises facing the country and win the battle for the soul of the nation,” the Biden campaign said in a press release.

Obama has been hitting the campaign trail for his former running mate in recent days, holding a drive-in rally in Orlando, Florida, yesterday.

Addressing the Orlando crowd, Obama once again sharply criticized Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, saying, “He’s jealous of Covid’s media coverage.”

Updated

Joe and Jill Biden vote early in Delaware

Joe and Jill Biden voted early by appointment in Delaware, becoming two of the more than 74 million Americans who have already cast their ballots in the election.

Sporting an “I Voted” sticker on his jacket, the Democratic nominee briefly spoke to reporters at the polling station after casting his ballot.

Biden briefly addressed the unrest in Philadelphia over the police killing of Walter Wallace Jr, defending demonstrators’ right to protest but saying, “There is no excuse whatsoever for the looting and the violence.”

Guilty plea coming for Giuliani associate?

A change-of-plea hearing has been scheduled for tomorrow for a man charged with conspiring with a former associate of Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who faces campaign finance charges.

The hearing for David Correia was disclosed in a docket entry in Manhattan federal court today, Reuters reports.

If he pleaded guilty, Correia would be the first defendant to do so among four charged last October over the making of illegal contributions to further their interests.

A lawyer for Correia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Prosecutors have charged Correia and co-defendant Andrey Kukushkin over an alleged scheme to channel donations to U.S. politicians from a Russian businessman to support a proposed marijuana business.

They have also charged Correia and former Giuliani associate Lev Parnas with conspiring to induce people to plow more than $2 million into their insurance company, but spending much of it on rent, car leasing payments, political donations and other expenses.

Parnas and another former Giuliani associate, Igor Fruman, face separate charges over their alleged use of a shell company to make an illegal $325,000 donation to a committee supporting Trump’s re-election.

Updated

Fauci says don't expect post-pandemic normal until 2022

America’s top public health official on infectious diseases, Anthony Fauci, has warned that everyday life is unlikely to resume until late 2021 or into 2022, while right now the coronavirus pandemic is getting “worse and worse”.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said Fauci will be the first person he calls if he gets elected next month, while Donald Trump continues to insist that the Covid-19 outbreak is nearly over, will go away, is just a political media obsession, etc, etc, all without evidence and in the face of rising case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths.

On the upside, Fauci did say in a virtual interview with Melbourne University today, once again that he’s confident there will be a safe and effective vaccine against coronavirus in the next few months.

But he warned: “I think it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,” Fauci, the highest ranking public official on the White House coronavirus task force, said.

“If normal means you can get people in a theatre without worrying about what we call congregate-setting super infections, if we can get restaurants to open almost at full capacity ...”

Dining out safely in New York these days means dining out of doors.
Dining out safely in New York these days means dining out of doors. Photograph: Noam Galai/Getty Images

And he decried the politicization of mask-wearing in the US.

“People were ridiculed for wearing masks. It depended on what side of the political spectrum you were at, which was so painful to me as a public health scientist.”

Trump recently called Fauci “an idiot” but the doctor, who has served presidents as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, said scientists must never be afraid to tell politicians what they don’t want to hear.

Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx of the White House coronavirus task force.
Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx of the White House coronavirus task force. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

Today so far

Biden has concluded his remarks on the coronavirus pandemic and the Affordable Care Act in Wilmington.

Here’s where the day stands so far:

  • Biden emphasized the coronavirus pandemic would not come to an immediate end if he wins the presidency. “Even if I win, it’s going to take a lot of hard work to end this pandemic,” the Democratic nominee said. “I’m not running on the false promise of being able to end this pandemic by flipping a switch.”
  • The CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter testified before the Senate on Section 230, a federal law that provides liability protections to internet companies. The hearing comes as Republicans have accused social media platforms of censorship, allegations that the CEOs have ardently denied.
  • Trump once again complained about the extensive news coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, which has already claimed more than 226,000 American lives. “Covid, Covid, Covid is the unified chant of the Fake News Lamestream Media,” the president said in a tweet this morning. Campaigning for Biden in Florida yesterday, Barack Obama accused Trump of being “jealous of Covid’s media coverage.”

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

Biden issued a warning about the potentially disastrous consequences of dismantling the Affordable Care Act, as the Trump administration has called for.

Speaking in Wilmington, Biden again noted that scrapping the ACA could force Americans to pay for the coronavirus vaccine once it becomes available.

But Biden emphasized the pandemic would not come to an immediate end if he is elected president.

“Even if I win, it’s going to take a lot of hard work to end this pandemic,” Biden said. “I’m not running on the false promise of being able to end this pandemic by flipping a switch.”

Biden delivers speech on coronavirus and Obamacare

Joe Biden is now delivering a speech on the coronavirus pandemic and the Affordable Care Act in Wilmington, Delaware.

The Democratic nominee once again urged Americans to wear face masks to limit the spread of coronavirus.

“This is not political, it’s patriotic, wearing a mask. Wear one, period,” Biden said.

The presidential candidate received a briefing from his public health advisers earlier today, and he and his wife, Jill Biden, plan to cast their ballots in Delaware after the speech.

Updated

Kushner bragged about Trump cutting doctors out of coronavirus response - report

Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner reportedly bragged in April about Trump having cut health experts out of conversations about the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

CNN reports:

In a taped interview on April 18, Kushner told legendary journalist Bob Woodward that Trump was ‘getting the country back from the doctors’ in what he called a ‘negotiated settlement.’ Kushner also proclaimed that the US was moving swiftly through the ‘panic phase’ and ‘pain phase’ of the pandemic and that the country was at the ‘beginning of the comeback phase.’

‘That doesn’t mean there’s not still a lot of pain and there won’t be pain for a while, but that basically was, we’ve now put out rules to get back to work,’ Kushner said. ‘Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors.’

About a week after after that interview, Trump infamously suggested Americans could protect themselves from coronavirus by ingesting disinfectants, a dangerous recommendation that was not backed up by any science.

And since Kushner made those comments to Woodward in April, nearly 200,000 additional Americans have died of coronavirus.

Senator Marco Rubio sent a warning about disinformation attacks in the days immediately before and after election day.

“WARNING[:] The bulk of disinformation attacks prepared by our adversaries were designed for the days before & just after Election Day ... They may come faster than they can be spotted & called out,so word to the wise,the more outlandish the claim,the likelier it’s foreign influence,” the Florida Republican said in a tweet.

Rubio, the acting chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, issued a joint statement with Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the panel, last week after the director of national intelligence announced Russia and Iran had gained access to US voter registration data.

The two senators said in the statement, “Republicans and Democrats are united when we say that continued attempts to sow dissent, cast doubt on election results, or disrupt our election systems and infrastructure will necessitate a severe response.”

Hillary Clinton said she will be one of the electors for Joe Biden in her home state of New York.

“I’m pretty sure I’ll get to vote for Joe and Kamala in New York, so that’s pretty exciting,” Clinton told SiriusXM. “I can’t wait.”

The former presidential nominee said she had not yet had the chance to vote because lines at polling stations have been so long in New York.

“So I’m waiting for either a break in the line so I can vote early, or I’ll just take a bag lunch and go stand in line to vote on election day, depending upon what I can get done,” Clinton said.

Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016, said she does not allow herself to think about the possibility of him being reelected.

“I cannot imagine that he would be reelected after the damage that’s he caused, and I can’t imagine four more years of this abuse and destruction,” Clinton said. “So no, I don’t think about it. I refuse to.”

Trump appears to be tuning into the Senate hearing with tech CEOs, given the president just tweeted out a complaint about how Twitter has handled a New York Post story about Hunter Biden.

“It’s amazing. Twitter refuses to allow the any mention of the Biden corruption story which was carried so well on @TuckerCarlson last night,” Trump said in the tweet.

“It’s the biggest story and Big Tech, together with the Lamestream Media, isn’t allowing a word to be said about it.”

That is not accurate. Twitter and Facebook limited the reach of the New York Post story out of concern about amplifying potentially false information weeks before a presidential election, but social media users can discuss (and most certainly have discussed) the story on these platforms.

Exhibit A: Trump himself has tweeted about the Hunter Biden story dozens of times.

Joe Biden is currently receiving a briefing on the coronavirus pandemic from his public health advisers.

Dr David Kessler, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, warned Biden of the recent rise in cases, “We are in the midst of the third wave, and I don’t think anyone can tell you how high this is going to get.”

After the briefing, Biden is scheduled to deliver a speech on “his plans to beat COVID-19, lower health care costs, and protect Americans with pre-existing conditions,” according to his campaign.

Meanwhile, Trump is headed to the swing state of Arizona to hold two campaign rallies today.

Senior White House advisers continue to downplay the ongoing threat of coronavirus, even as cases surge to record-high levels across the country.

Speaking to Fox News, White House communications director Alyssa Farah was asked about a press release that cited “ending the Covid-19 pandemic” as one of the Trump administration’s top accomplishments.

“I think that was poorly worded,” Farah said of the press release. “The intent was to say that it is our goal to end the virus. But what I would say is this, because of the president’s leadership, we are rounding the corner on the virus.”

Trump has made similar claims on the campaign trail, but those comments do not align with the number of coronavirus cases and deaths the US is reporting every day.

According to Johns Hopkins University, another 985 Americans died of coronavirus yesterday, and the country confirmed 73,240 new cases yesterday.

Tech CEOs testify before the Senate on Section 230

The CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Google are testifying before the Senate today about Section 230, a federal law that provides liability protections to internet companies.

The Guardian’s Kari Paul provides more context on the hearing:

Wednesday’s hearing with Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai will take place less than a week before election day and was convened to address section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law underpinning US internet regulation that exempts platforms from legal liability for content generated by its users.

The hearing will investigate “how best to preserve the internet as a forum for open discourse”, according to the Senate judiciary committee, and it comes largely in response to allegations of anti-conservative bias in the tech world.

Senate Republicans indicated they wanted to question Pichai and Zuckerberg in October to discuss issues related to section 230. Dorsey was added to the mix after Twitter restricted the circulation of a controversial New York Post article that featured potentially hacked materials relating to Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

In prepared testimony for Wednesday’s hearing, Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, said eroding the foundation of section 230 ‘could collapse how we communicate on the internet, leaving only a small number of giant and well-funded technology companies’.

For more updates and analysis of the hearing, follow Kari’s live blog of the CEOs’ testimony.

It’s official: Kamala Harris is headed to Texas on Friday, as polls show the state, which has long been considered a Republican stronghold, is increasingly up for grabs in the presidential race.

“On Friday, October 30, Kamala Harris will travel to Fort Worth, McAllen, and Houston, Texas,” the Biden campaign said in a press release.

The news comes as the Cook Political Report has moved Texas from “Lean Republican” to “Toss Up” in its Electoral College forecast to reflect tightening polls and high early turnout.

Beto O’Rourke, who lost his 2018 Senate race against Ted Cruz by just 3 points, has said he believes Texas is “Biden’s state to lose.”

Senate candidate Theresa Greenfield is pausing her RV tour in Iowa, after some of her staffers came into contact with a person who later tested positive for coronavirus.

The campaign said Greenfield, a Democrat trying to unseat Republican incumbent Joni Ernst, is regularly tested and would now receive another test to ensure she has not contracted the virus.

There are just six days left until Election Day, and recent polls have shown the Iowa Senate race, which could determine control of the chamber, to be very close.

The Cook Political Report has moved Texas from “Lean Republican” to “Toss Up” in its Electoral College forecast, after several recent polls showed Trump and Biden running neck and neck in the traditionally conservative state.

The Cook Report’s Amy Walter writes:

Texas is a state that Biden doesn’t need to win, but it is clear that it’s more competitive than ever. Texas’ shift from Lean Republican to Toss Up shouldn’t come as a surprise. Recent polling in the state — both public and private - shows a 2-4 point race. That’s pretty much in line with the hotly contested 2018 Senate race in the state where Sen. Ted Cruz narrowly defeated Rep. Beto O’Rourke 51 percent to 48 percent.

A huge surge in early vote (as of October 26th, almost half of Texas’ registered voters had already cast a ballot) suggests that we could see record turnout in a state that has added many new residents since 2016. That also adds a level of uncertainty to the equation.

According to the US Elections Project, 7,803,590 Texans have already cast their ballots in the election, representing about 87% of the state’s total 2016 turnout.

Trump will hold another rally in the swing state of Florida tomorrow, with just 5 days to go until Election Day.

The Trump campaign just announced the president will hold a rally in Tampa, Florida, tomorrow at 1:30 PM ET.

The event will also come two days after Barack Obama held a drive-in rally in Orlando, where the former president mocked his successor for being “jealous of Covid’s media coverage.”

Obama’s speech was carried live on Fox News, prompting outrage from one of the network’s most consistent viewers: the president.

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

The Trump team is eager to talk about the coronavirus pandemic as if it’s over, even as cases surge to record-high levels across the country.

In a CNN interview this morning, Hogan Gidley, the press secretary of the president’s reelection campaign, was asked why the White House listed “ending the Covid-19 pandemic” as one of the Trump administration’s accomplishments on a press release.

Gidley was asked whether he thought the pandemic was over, even though nearly 1,000 Americans are dying of the virus every day.

“We’re moving in the right direction,” Gidley said. “I didn’t write the document.”

As Alisyn Camerota pressed him on whether he thought it was accurate to say the pandemic had ended, Gidley said, “I’m not looking at the document. I don’t know what the documents says or how it characterizes the word ‘ending,’ but I’m not going to quibble over semantics.”

The tense exchange was reminiscent of Trump repeatedly (and falsely) saying the country is “rounding the turn” in its coronavirus crisis.

Tom Perkins reports for us that a Michigan court has sided with gun advocates to reverse a proposed firearm ban at polls:

Tom Lambert says he plans to pull the lever at his designated polling station in a Kentwood church just as he has every election for about the last 10 years – with a gun on his hip and a smile on his face.

The Michigan resident said he doesn’t expect to need to use his firearm while casting a ballot, but he added, “it’s the fight you don’t expect that you prepare for”.

It remains to be seen, however, whether he’s legally allowed to bring his gun this time. Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state, earlier this month implemented new rules that ban guns within 100ft of polling stations. Now, after several gun rights advocates, including Lambert, sued, a state court judge struck down the rules on Tuesday, just a week before election day. The attorney general’s office plans to appeal.

Why is it important? Well, Trump has been repeatedly urging his supporters to watch voting very closely, in what many people have said is an attempt at putting together a voter intimidation army. And in Michigan, at least, they can be armed.

Read more here: Michigan court sides with gun advocates to reverse firearm ban at polls

Here’s a bit more on those scenes last night where it seems hundreds of Donald Trump supporters were left stuck at the end of his Omaha rally, leading, it appears, to some people being taken to hospital. Tim Elfrink writes for the Washington Post:

By the time President Trump finished speaking to thousands of supporters at Omaha’s Eppley Airfield on Tuesday night and jetted away on Air Force One, the temperature had plunged to nearly freezing.

But as long lines of MAGA-clad attendees queued up for buses to take them to distant parking lots, it quickly became clear that something was wrong.

The buses, the huge crowd soon learned, couldn’t navigate the jammed airport roads. For hours, attendees — including many elderly Trump supporters — stood in the cold, as police scrambled to help those most at-risk get to warmth.

At least seven people were taken to hospitals, according to Omaha Scanner, which monitors official radio traffic.

David Smiley of the Miami Herald has this update on early voting numbers in Florida, suggesting that Republican voter turn-out is increasing the closer we get to 3 November.

Trump doubles-down on claim media only covers Covid crisis to damage him before election

Donald Trump has doubled-down on his baseless refrain that the media are only reporting about Covid as a ploy to harm his re-election chances.

As mentioned earlier, the number of people hospitalized for the virus in the US has climbed an estimated 46 percent from a month ago. Twenty-six states are currently at or near record numbers for new infections, and more than 500,000 new cases have been confirmed in the past week. No states or territories are seeing a sustained decline in case numbers.

Yesterday he was mocked by former president Barack Obama at an election rally for Joe Biden in Florida. Obama criticised his successor’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, noting that Trump had complained about the amount of news coverage it had received even as the US death toll continues to climb. ‘He’s jealous of Covid’s media coverage,’ Obama said.

The former president also criticised Trump for his personal lack of coronavirus safety, saying that he had turned the White House into a ‘hot zone’ in the wake of two coronavirus outbreaks among the president and his senior staff. ‘Florida, we can’t afford four more years of this,’ Obama added. ‘We cannot afford this kind of incompetence and disinterest.’

Updated

The Trump administration has slashed the number of refugees it will allow to resettle in the United States in the coming year, capping the number at 15,000, a record low in the history of the country’s modern refugee program, report Reuters.

Trump finalized his plan in a memo overnight and said the ceiling for fiscal 2021, which started this month, includes 6,000 unused placements from last year “that might have been used if not for the Covid-19 pandemic.”

In his statement, Trump said any new refugees this year should be placed by the US state department in parts of the country open to hosting them.

“Newly admitted refugees should be placed, to the maximum extent possible, in States and localities that have clearly expressed their willingness to receive refugees” and “resettled in communities that are eager and equipped to support their successful integration into American society and the labor force,” Trump said.

Critics say that Trump has abandoned a longstanding US role as a safe haven for persecuted people and that cutting refugee admissions undermines other foreign policy goals.

Joe Biden has pledged to raise refugee admissions to 125,000 a year if he defeats Trump, although advocates have said the program could take years to recover.

Vanity Fair have put up their big cover feature and interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez this morning. It’s by Michelle Ruiz:

From her swearing-in in January 2019, Ocasio-Cortez became the de facto spokeswoman for the historically diverse 2018 midterm class, including a record 36 women and 24 people of color as freshmen in the House. Yoho’s outburst on the Capitol steps [he called her a “fucking bitch”] was a painful illustration of how some in the entrenched ruling class greeted their arrival—a finger in the face of change. AOC’s status as overnight sensation unsettled some in Washington. “I’ve never seen folks who were in the gallery get all excited about seeing a member of the Oversight Committee,” says Representative Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat and friend. “Other members are jealous.”

She has demonstrated a special talent for triggering white-male fragility on both ends of the political spectrum. Three months after her 2018 primary, Andrew Cuomo dismissed her victory as a “fluke.” Ron DeSantis, a congressman at the time, called her “this girl…or whatever she is.” That demographic of politico are allowed to be wunderkinds—Joe Biden was 29 when he first won his Senate seat; Mayor Pete Buttigieg launched a presidential bid at 37, the same age as Tom Cotton when he ascended to the Senate. But “we are not used to seeing young women of color in positions of power,” says journalist Andrea González-Ramírez, an early chronicler of AOC’s rise.

The main news line out of it – apart from the sheer toll the number of death threats she gets is taking on her – is what she says about her potential political future.

Her aspirations are a matter of endless speculation: New York Senate, House leadership, a Cabinet post? “I don’t know if I’m really going to be staying in the House forever, or if I do stay in the House, what that would look like,” she says. “I don’t see myself really staying where I’m at for the rest of my life.” This is one of the few times AOC seems guarded and cautious about her words. “I don’t want to aspire to a quote-unquote higher position just for the sake of that title or just for the sake of having a different or higher position. I truly make an assessment to see if I can be more effective. And so, you know, I don’t know if I could necessarily be more effective in an administration, but, for me that’s always what the question comes down to.”

Read more here: Vanity Fair – AOC’s next four years

Ross Ramsey writes for the Texas Tribune today, looking at the impact coronavirus is having on the election there. In theory the state should be safely Republican on Tuesday, but some Democrats believe it might be in play, with Mike Bloomberg ploughing cash into TV ads to support Joe Biden in a state that hasn’t turned blue since Jimmy Carter won it in 1976.

This election’s October surprise is no surprise at all.

It’s the novel coronavirus, and cases are rising as people are voting. Look no further than the nation’s 22nd-largest city — El Paso — effectively shut down because of a Covid-19 surge right in the middle of early voting. It’s not necessarily that people can’t vote — they’ve been told to go ahead, with caution — but about what’s likely to be on their minds as they fill out those ballots.

Undecided voters are harder to find. In an election that is more about who will show up to vote than about how they’ll vote, new revelations haven’t seemed to move public opinion much.

And the primary subject of public conversation hasn’t changed appreciably since mid-March, when the pandemic snagged the full attention of government officials and the public. Those two things — a tiny number of undecided voters and a pandemic with a monthslong hold on everyone’s attention — are related. It’s hard to change minds if you can’t change the subject.

Read more here: Texas Tribune – The 2020 election’s October surprise has been with us for months

The New York Times this morning had this bleak run-down of the latest coronavirus situation in the US:

Approaching the eve of the election, President Trump has downplayed the steep rise in cases, attributing much of it to increased testing. But the number of people hospitalized for the virus tells a different story, climbing an estimated 46 percent from a month ago and raising fears about the capacity of regional health care systems to respond to overwhelming demand.

Twenty-six states are at or near record numbers for new infections. More than 500,000 cases have been announced in the past week. No states are seeing sustained declines in case numbers.

And while the escalating case numbers had not been accompanied by a steep rise in deaths, that trend is starting to change. About 800 deaths are now being recorded across the country each day, far fewer than in the spring but up slightly from earlier this month.

This comes as it was reported that the proportion of US adults reporting wearing face masks increased from 78% in April to 89% in June, according to a nationally representative survey released by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But the survey found either no change or a decline in other behaviors aimed at preventing the spread of the coronavirus, such as hand-washing, social distancing and avoiding public or crowded places.

New polling numbers. The Washington Post has declared that Biden leads Trump narrowly in Michigan, significantly in Wisconsin.

Former vice president Joe Biden continues to outpace President Trump in two crucial Midwest battlegrounds, currently holding a slight lead over the president in Michigan while showing a much more substantial advantage in Wisconsin, according to a pair of Washington Post-ABC News polls.

The surveys show Biden narrowly ahead of Trump among likely voters in Michigan by 51 percent to 44 percent, with Libertarian Party nominee Jo Jorgensen at 3 percent. In Wisconsin, likely voters favor Biden by 57 percent to 40 percent, with Jorgensen at 2 percent. Among registered voters, Biden’s edge in Michigan is five points, while he leads by 17 points in Wisconsin.

That 51 to 44 percent lead in Michigan might sound a bit more than ‘narrowly’, but pollsters are very cautious about their margins of error here.

The Post reports that Biden’s margins in both states are driven by overwhelming support among female likely voters. He leads Trump by 24 points among those women in Michigan and by 30 points in Wisconsin.

Read more here: Washington Post – Post-ABC polls: Biden leads Trump narrowly in Michigan, significantly in Wisconsin

The president is up and tweeting, and his first message of the day for the nation is about a New York Times story about Trump’s failed business dealings in Chicago. He’s suggesting the story makes him out to be ‘a smart guy rather than a bad guy’.

The New York Times story – How Trump maneuvered his way out of trouble in Chicago – is billed as explaining how “When his skyscraper proved a disappointment, Donald Trump defaulted on his loans, sued his bank, got much of the debt forgiven — and largely avoided paying taxes on it.”

“We’re in love with the building,” Mr. Trump gushed. “We’re very, very happy with what’s happened with respect to this building and how fast we put it up.”

He and his family hoped the Trump International Hotel & Tower would cement their company’s reputation as one of the world’s marquee developers of luxury real estate.

Instead, the skyscraper became another disappointment in a portfolio filled with them. Construction lagged. Condos proved hard to sell. Retail space sat vacant.

Yet for Mr. Trump and his company, the Chicago experience also turned out to be something else: the latest example of his ability to strong-arm major financial institutions and exploit the tax code to cushion the blow of his repeated business failures.

The president’s federal income tax records, obtained by The New York Times, show for the first time that, since 2010, his lenders have forgiven about $287 million in debt that he failed to repay. The vast majority was related to the Chicago project.

Read more here: How New York Times – Trump maneuvered his way out of trouble in Chicago

Updated

You knew it was going to happen. Sexy mail-in ballot is apparently in vogue as a halloween costume this year. Well, someone is trying to sell them anyway, which might not be quite the same thing.

As mentioned earlier, we may be left hanging around waiting for definitive elections results for quite some time after Tuesday’s election day. But that is not deterring my colleagues Jonathan Freedland, Kenya Evelyn, David Smith and Sarah Churchwell, who will be holding an online discussion event about the results on Wednesday 4 November, starting at 2pm in New York, or at 7pm if like me you are in London. You can find out more details and book tickets here.

In the meatime, you can get practicing for Tuesday night with our ‘build your own election’ interactive. Pick which states are going to opt for Trump, and which for Biden, and work out their respective paths to victory…

Andrew Gumbel has this for us today, looking at how challenger Phil Arballo may be in with a shot at unseating Congressman Devin Nunes in California:

“He’s forgotten about his constituents. That’s the bottom line,” Arballo said in an interview with the Guardian. “Instead of holding himself accountable and reassuring people they’re going to be protected, instead of pushing for stimulus money and PPE in response to the coronavirus, he’s on Fox News talking about Hillary Clinton. He’s in a different world. He has no plans for the future. He believes he’s entitled to this seat and takes every voter for granted.”

Read it here: ‘We couldn’t stand it anymore’: why disaffection with Devin Nunes is growing among his constituents

Another reason that it may have been hard for Rudy Giuliani to get much traction painting the Biden family as a corrupt criminal enterprise is that Americans can see in plain sight what is going on in front of them. Last night the Washington Post dropped a report showing that Trump’s businesses have received $8.1 million from taxpayers and his political donors since he took office.

The president brought taxpayer money to his businesses simply by bringing himself. He’s visited his hotels and clubs more than 280 times now, making them a familiar backdrop for his presidency. And in doing so, he has turned those properties into magnets for GOP events, including glitzy fundraisers for his own reelection campaign, where big donors go to see and be seen.

Trump says the reason is comfort. “People like my product, what can I tell you, can’t help it,” he told reporters last year.

But documents show that visits by Trump, his family and his supporters have turned the government and the Republican Party into regular customers for the family business.

In the case of the government, Trump’s visits turned it into a captive customer, newly revealed documents show. What the government needed from Trump’s properties, it had to buy from Trump’s company.

So the more he went, the more he got. Since 2017, Trump’s company has charged taxpayers for hotel rooms, ballrooms, cottages, rental houses, golf carts, votive candles, floating candles, candelabras, furniture moving, resort fees, decorative palm trees, strip steak, chocolate cake, breakfast buffets, $88 bottles of wine and $1,000 worth of liquor for White House aides. And water.

Not bad for someone who only paid $750 in federal tax the year after he became president.

Read more here: Washington Post – Ballrooms, candles and luxury cottages: During Trump’s term, millions of government and GOP dollars have flowed to his properties

One of the reasons that Rudy Giuliani might have been so tetchy in that TV interview could be that his plan to deliver a devastating campaign “October surprise” appears to have gone awry. Tina Nguyen writes for Politico:

Weeks ago, when Rudy Giuliani first threw the contents of Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop online, he promised a trove of even more damning information 10 days before the election.

Yet with less than a week to go, Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, is still moving down the conservative media food chain, looking for takers.

The Wall Street Journal and Fox News have both reported finding no evidence that former Vice President Joe Biden benefited from the Hunter Biden business dealings that have drawn scrutiny. More explicitly pro-Trump media outlets — OAN, Breitbart, Newsmax — have mostly shied away from publishing fresher, more salacious allegations. And conservative talking heads — pundits, politicians and loud MAGA Twitter personalities alike — have been more focused on the meta narrative around the laptop, arguing that mainstream media, social media companies and the deep state are conspiring to prevent president Donald Trump’s reelection by suppressing the story.

Giuliani has groused on his podcast, “Common Sense,” that the public can only find out the truth from him, “because I’m not allowed on main television to tell you these things.”

And all that without mentioning Borat once…

Read more here: Politico – MAGA scrambles to repair the Hunter Biden narrative

Updated

Michael Sainato has been in Florida for us looking at some of the tough choices the poorest American families are facing during the pandemic.

Ann Largent of Orlando, has been out of work as a patient care technician through the pandemic, but found a new job and was hired in the beginning of August at a nursing home. She has yet to receive a start date, but a hold was placed on her unemployment benefits on 5 September, and she hasn’t received any benefits since.

Largent, 39, lives in a mobile trailer park with her 12-year-old daughter, who requires frequent doctor appointments as her cancer is in remission. When she first lost her job in the beginning of the pandemic, Largent received $355 a month in Snap food assistance, but the benefits were reduced to $16 per month when her unemployment benefits began.

The Trump administration authorized a $600 a week boost to unemployment benefits in March but that was cut to $300 and Congress has since been deadlocked on a replacement. Once the expanded unemployment benefits ended on 26 July, Largent was only receiving $247 a week, Florida’s maximum unemployment benefit payout after taxes are taken out.

Her rent is $244 weekly, which includes water and electricity, and she is currently at risk of eviction for running late on rent.

Read more here: ‘Bills or food’: crisis mounts for thousand of unemployed Americans

Now, if you were hoping to get a nice early result on election day, I have bad news for you. Well, the New York Times does, anyway. They’ve done an exercise asking election officials when they expect to have all the ballots counted, and if you are anxious about the election result, maybe look away now…

Only eight states expect to have at least 98 percent of unofficial results reported by noon the day after the election. Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia allow postmarked ballots to arrive after Election Day, so the timing will depend on when voters return them.

New York, Rhode Island and Alaska will not report any mail votes on election night. Officials in Michigan and Pennsylvania, two key battleground states, have said full official counts could take several days.

One person this is unlikely to please is Donald Trump, who yesterday again repeated his completely baseless assertion that ballots must be counted on the day, and not after it.

Trump has repeatedly criticized mail-in voting as prone to fraud even though experts say that is rare, and again questioned the integrity of the process yesterday saying it would be “inappropriate” to take extra time to count mail ballots.

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

Nick Fiorellini reports for us today on how Trump’s election day director is waging war on the election in Philadelphia:

For decades before he worked for the president, Donald Trump’s director of Election Day operations has called out and made allegations of voter fraud by the Democratic party, building a lucrative career in the process. His name is Mike Roman, and this year he’s claiming an increase in mail ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic will allow Democrats to cheat and steal the election, despite little evidence.

Earlier this year, Roman visited battleground states and worked with local candidates and parties to recruit volunteers to monitor election sites. The Trump campaign hasn’t released information about the number of volunteer observers it has recruited in each state but claims it has established a 50,000-plus army of volunteers across an array of swing states.

“This is one of the things about Mike Roman, is that he’s helping assemble this massive team of volunteers to ‘observe’ satellite voting places and it truly is voter intimidation, plain and simple,” said Tiffany Muller, president of Let America Vote, a voter’s right organization.

Trump’s campaign spent some time last week surveilling and videotaping voters dropping off mail ballots at Philadelphia City Hall. Pennsylvania’s attorney general warned that the campaign’s actions fall outside of permitted poll watching practices and could lead to voter intimidation.

Read more here: Trump’s election day director is waging war on the election in Philadelphia

Walter Wallace Jr killing: family had called for ambulance over mental health crisis, not for police intervention

There’s some more from Claudia Lauer of the Associated Press on the family of Walter Wallace Jr, the 27 year old Black man who was shot dead by police in Philadelphia on Monday afternoon, leading to two nights of protest.

The family lawyer says they had called for an ambulance to get him help with a mental health crisis, not for police intervention.

Police have said he was wielding a knife and ignored orders to drop the weapon before officers fired shots. His parents said that officers knew their son was in a mental health crisis because they had been to the family’s house three times on Monday.

Cathy Wallace, his mother, said one of the times, “they stood there and laughed at us.”

The Wallace family’s attorney, Shaka Johnson, said the man’s wife, Dominique Wallace, is pregnant and is scheduled to have labor induced Wednesday. Johnson said Wallace had nine children, two of whom briefly spoke at a news conference late Tuesday, along with Walter Wallace’s mother and father.

“When you come to a scene where somebody is in a mental crisis, and the only tool you have to deal with it is a gun ... where are the proper tools for the job?” Johnson said, arguing that Philadelphia police officers are not properly trained to handle mental health crises.

Johnson said Wallace’s brother had called 911 to request medical assistance and ambulance.

Walter Wallace, Sr. speaks to the press about the police killing of his son.
Walter Wallace, Sr. speaks to the press about the police killing of his son. Photograph: Andrew H Walker/REX/Shutterstock

Throughout yesterday state and local officials called for transparency and a thorough investigation, including the release of body camera footage from the two officers who fired their weapons. Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said at a news conference Tuesday that she was still reviewing when and what information would be released to the public. The officers had not been interviewed as of Tuesday afternoon, she said.

Neither had a Taser or similar device at the time of the shooting, Outlaw said, noting the department had previously asked for funding to equip more officers with those devices.

Outlaw said the officers’ names and other identifying information, including their race, would be withheld until the department could be sure releasing the information would not pose a threat to their safety. The officers were taken off street duty during the investigation.

The two officers each fired at least seven rounds at least 14 total shots but Chief Police Inspector Frank Vanore could not say how many times Wallace, 27, was struck.

Wallace’s father, Walter Wallace Sr. said Tuesday night that he is haunted by the way his son was “butchered.”

“It’s in my mind. I can’t even sleep at night. I can’t even close my eyes,” he said.

“These people don’t believe in science, they believe in power and whatever gives them control” said president Trump yesterday, while arguing that the country was doing well in its Covid response. The numbers across the US don’t suggest that is true.

At his Wisconsin rally, Trump also made a baseless prediction that the media would say the country was doing ‘extremely well’ one day after the election

As of 12:25am EST this morning, the US had recorded 8,768,912 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, leading to a total of 226,514 deaths. Yesterday there were 73,240 new infections and 985 new deaths. That is a daily rate of new cases some 39% higher than it was a fortnight ago.

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Trump and Harris campaigning in Arizona today – Biden will give speech about Covid

President Donald Trump will hold two campaign rallies today in the battleground state of Arizona, where polls show him narrowly trailing.

Joe Biden will receive a briefing from public health experts on coronavirus, and later in the day he will deliver remarks on his plans to beat Covid. He will also talk about his plans to protect Americans with pre-existing health conditions. In the afternoon he will headline a Biden for President finance event.

Kamala Harris is in Arizona. In the morning she is meeting with a group of Latina business owners and she will then participate in an early vote mobilization event. In the afternoon she is meeting with a group of black leaders and she will participate in another early vote mobilization event with Alicia Keys.

Vice president Mike Pence is doing a ‘Make America Great Again’ rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin, and then will do another rally in Flint, Michigan.

Amid an unprecedented number of early votes cast in the 2020 election cycle, Alabama senator Doug Jones is staking his electoral fortunes on framing his re-election campaign around the threat to voting rights, especially in his native Deep South.

Jones, a rare Democratic senator in a red southern state, has been sounding the alarm on his state’s burdensome voting restrictions. He’s been dinging his opponent over comments about a landmark voting law, and he’s arguing that in an age of high partisanship in America there’s a path for lawmakers to reinforce national voting laws.

Jones, the Alabama Democrat who was elected to his Senate seat in a 2017 upset race, is also calling for a new extension of the Voting Rights Act, the set of voting protections that were gutted in a ruling by the United States supreme court seven years ago. That ruling struck down a core provision of the law which required nine states to seek federal approval before changing their election laws. Those states were required to seek federal permission because of a history of enforcing voter requirements that dramatically affected minorities.

Jones has repeatedly bashed retired coach Tommy Tuberville, the Republican nominee for Jones’s seat, for failing to offer a concise position on the Voting Rights Act.

“It’s not that he couldn’t articulate a stance, he couldn’t articulate what the hell it is,” Jones said in an interview with the Guardian.

During a 1 September appearance with service organizations in Alabama, Tuberville was asked whether he supported extending the Voting Rights Act. His response suggested he had no idea what the law is.

“You know, the thing about the Voting Rights Act it’s … you know … there’s a lot of different things you can look at it as, you know, who’s it going to help? What direction do we need to go with it?” Tuberville said. “I think it’s important that everything we do we keep secure.”

Read more from Daniel’s report here: Democratic senator Doug Jones stakes re-election bid on threat to voting rights

Updated

Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney to Donald Trump and former mayor of New York city, has threatened to walk out of a tense interview on the Fox Business.

Recently embarrassed by his appearance in a compromising scene the new Borat movie, Giuliani was being pressed on the provenance of stories about what is claimed to be Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Host Lisa Kennedy Montgomery suggested that the stories emanating from the “found” laptop and reported by the New York Post were similar to the kind of broad smear that the famed Christopher Steele dossier made about president Donald Trump.

This angered Giuliani, who said: “You better apologize for that! I’ve been a United States attorney, associate attorney general, mayor of New York City and a member of the bar for 50 years.”

Describing the suggestion as an “outrageous defamation” and accusing the host of “repeating lying propaganda”, he then angrily said: “I think our interview is now over. I don’t talk to people who accuse me.”

Emails purporting to come from the laptop make the suggestion that a Ukrainian business partner contacted Hunter Biden about setting up a meeting with his father, the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden. The laptop and emails have not been independently verified, and the New York Post is yet to produce any evidence that Hunter Biden replied to the email, or that any meeting took place.

During the interview Giuliani made the point that both Fox and the New York Post were owned by Rupert Murdoch, taunting his interviewer by saying: “Do you think Rupert Murdoch would let them print false material?”

“Heavens, no,” came the rather dry reply.

Guiliani was also asked about his unwitting contribution to Sacha Baron Cohen’s movie, in which it seemed that the 76-year-old was prepared to enter into sexual activity with an actress playing Borat’s daughter.

Montgomery, who goes by the name of Kennedy on screen, said: “I have a 15-year-old daughter, I watched that, I was kinda grossed out by it.”

Guiliani again claimed that during the moment that some people think shows him touching his genitals he was merely tucking in his shirt while lying down on a bed.

The interview has not gone down brilliantly with all of Fox’s viewers, with Kennedy tweeting that it had led to viewers calling her a “traitor”, “loser” and “literally a piece of shiii”.

Giuliani ended the segment by saying: “I have not loved this conversation. I find this conversation totally insulting.”

Updated

Highest turnout since 1908 predicted after 70 million Americans vote early

Here’s more on that headline figure that 70 million American voters have already cast their ballots. That’s more than half the total turnout of the 2016 election, with one week still to go until Election Day, according to a tally yesterday from the US elections project.

The tally, which shows a record-breaking pace that could lead to the highest voter turnout in percentage terms in more than a century. It also highlights voters’ desire to reduce their risk of exposure to Covid-19 as the pandemic regathers strength heading into winter.

Reuters report that overall, Democrats hold roughly a two-to-one advantage in early voting numbers. However, Republicans in recent weeks have narrowed the gap in early, in-person voting, data shows.

The high level of early voting has led Michael McDonald, the University of Florida professor who administers the US elections project, to predict a record voter turnout of about 150 million, representing 65% of those eligible to vote, the highest rate since 1908.

Updated

Louisiana is bracing today for what is expected to be its third hurricane strike this year as Zeta, the 27th named storm of a historically busy Atlantic hurricane season, headed toward an expected landfall south of New Orleans.

Zeta raked across the Yucatan Peninsula Tuesday, striking as a hurricane, before weakening to a tropical storm. It is forecast to regain hurricane strength before hitting the Gulf Coast sometime Wednesday evening.

Hurricane warnings stretched from Morgan City, Louisiana, along the Mississippi coast to the Alabama state line. Late Tuesday, the storm had sustained winds of 65 mph (105 kph) and was centered 410 miles (655 kilometers) south-southwest of the Mississippi River’s mouth.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards asked President Donald Trump for a disaster declaration ahead of the storm. He and Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey both declared emergencies, as did Mayor Andrew Gilich in Biloxi, Mississippi. Trump declared an emergency for Louisiana Tuesday evening.

“There’s no doubt that we’ve seen a lot this year, with Covid and so many threats from so many storms,” Gilich said in a news release, “but this storm shows that we haven’t seen it all yet.”

Forecasts predict for anywhere from 2 to 6 inches (5 to 15 centimeters) of rain to fall in the New Orleans area. Officials noted that Zeta is expected to be a relatively fast-moving storm, possibly mitigating the flood threat.

Zeta broke the record for the previous earliest 27th Atlantic named storm that formed Nov. 29, 2005. It’s also the 11th hurricane of the season. An average season sees six hurricanes and 12 named storms.

The extraordinarily busy hurricane season has focused attention on the role of climate change, which scientists say is causing wetter, stronger and more destructive storms.

Another approaching storm piled on more worries for evacuees from previous hurricanes. The state is sheltering about 3,600 evacuees from previous hurricanes Laura and Delta, most in New Orleans area hotels.

“I’m physically and mentally tired,” a distraught Yolanda Lockett of Lake Charles told Associated Press, while standing outside a New Orleans hotel.

General Manager of Pere Antoine Restaurant Gaige Rodriguez, left, and cook Michael Dillon board up windows as they prepare for the arrival of tropical storm Zeta in New Orleans.
General Manager of Pere Antoine Restaurant Gaige Rodriguez, left, and cook Michael Dillon board up windows as they prepare for the arrival of tropical storm Zeta in New Orleans. Photograph: Kathleen Flynn/Reuters

In Louisiana’s coastal St. Bernard Parish, east of New Orleans, Robert Campo readied his marina, again, for an approaching storm. “We’re down for four or five days, that’s four or five days nobody’s fishing. That’s four or five days nobody is shrimping. That’s four or five days, no economic wheels are turning,” he said.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Thomas Hymel, an extension agent in Jeanerette with the LSU Agricultural Center, said of this year’s series of storms and other troubles. He said the storms have meant more than a month of down time for seafood harvesters, many of whom are suffering a drop in demand from restaurants due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Sometimes I can barely believe what I’m writing myself, but overnight USA Today has felt the need to write a definitive fact-check on whether there is a fake Melania. Their verdict on the recurring conspiracy theory about the president’s wife is that it is false.

Akili Ramsess, the executive director of the National Press Photographers Association, previously explained to the Associated Press that the angle at which the photos are taken, the type of camera lens that is used, and the positioning of the photographer can all impact how subjects appear in photos.

Our rating: False. Based on our research, the conspiracy theory that the White House has used a body double to sub for Melania Trump is FALSE. The White House and President Donald Trump have denied it, and the photos and videos that have been cited as proof of the theory have been anomalies. After all, no one looks the same in every photo that is taken of them.

The president himself has previously contested the baseless claim, tweeting “The Fake News photoshopped pictures of Melania, then propelled conspiracy theories that it’s actually not her by my side in Alabama and other places.”

Read more here: USA Today – Fact check: Images show Melania Trump, not a body double

Walter Wallace Sr., the father of a 27 year old Black man fatally shot by police in Philadelphia, appealed to people to “stop the violence” in the city out of respect for his son and family.

“I don’t condone no violence, tearing up the city, looting of the stores, and all this chaos,” he told reporters and a gathering of people. “It’s an SOS to help, not to hurt.”

He also called for “justice” in a case still being investigated.

Protest for the police killing of Walter Wallace Jr. in Philadelphia.
Protest for the police killing of Walter Wallace Jr. in Philadelphia. Photograph: Andrew H Walker/REX/Shutterstock

Tension has gripped Philadelphia’s streets since Monday’s deadly police shooting of Walter Wallace, 27, who was armed with a knife and described by relatives as suffering from a mental breakdown in a confrontation with law enforcement.

John McNesby, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 5, defended the officers in a statement, saying, “These officers were aggressively approached by a man wielding a knife”. Witnesses claim that Wallace’s mother was attempting to intervene and shield her son.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that according to family members, Wallace was battling profound mental health issues about which police were aware.

“What is especially heartbreaking is that the whole world saw that man murdered in front of his mother,” Asantewaa Nkrumah-Ture, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace, told the crowd that had gathered for an early-evening rally.

Another speaker at the rally said that she had recently been in the same park for a vigil for Breonna Taylor, and that ″I’m tired of talking about this in school. I’m tired of talking about this with my family.”

A truck displays a sign as protesters march in West Philadelphia.
A truck displays a sign as protesters march in West Philadelphia. Photograph: Gabriella Audi/AFP/Getty Images

Hundreds of the marchers demanding racial justice periodically skirmished with police through the night and into early Wednesday, report Reuters.

Police turned out in force to cordon off a West Philadelphia commercial district that was looted the previous night. But looters broke into business elsewhere, in the city’s Port Richmond section, aerial news video from WPVI television showed. At other times, police in riot gear shoved jeering protesters back from barricade lines.

The events have inevitably been leveraged for political purposes in the campaign for the presidential election, with liberals and progressives arguing for racial justice and police reform while conservatives decry the chaos and property damage.

Philadelphia police have yet to detail the night’s arrests and injuries. They had said that unrest the previous night had injured 30 officers and led to 90 arrests.

It isn’t just who ends up in the White House that is at stake next week. There are lots of competitive Senate races on the ballot as well, with Democrats eyeing up the opportunity to end the Republican majority.

Here’s our guide to the key races that will determine power in Washington for the next couple of years.

Ian Martin, who was a writer and supervising producer for the HBO series Veep, has written for us this morning, sending his best wishes to the US from the UK, saying “We thought Reagan was the devil – then came Trump. America, we’re rooting for you”. He starts out…

HEY! How you guys doing? Longtime British Americanophile “reaching out” across the Atlantic. I’m here to heart you, USA. I’m like “hope the hurting stops soon” (strong-arm mid-tone emoji).

I guess you’re all making a list of The Worst Things Trump Did, then checking it twice because really, who’d believe it. And I know he’s primarily your monstrous problem. But even Brits are citizens of what we used to call “the free world”. Your president was once the leader of it. And one of the very worst things Trump’s done is to make Ronald Reagan look like an intellectual giant. Simply by comparison, Trump has humanised Reagan and elevated his memory to sainthood.

I’m currently researching the Gipper for a project and honestly, next to Trump he genuinely seems like … not the good guy, exactly? But definitely presidential. “Let’s make America great again” was Reagan’s slogan, of course. It was about “American values”, making America great in the world again. Trump’s slogan initially stood for rebuilding economic power. Now it’s shorthand for “let’s win the culture war I relentlessly inflame and sure, bring on an actual armed civil war if I lose the election”.

Read more here: Ian Martin – We thought Reagan was the devil – then came Trump. America, we’re rooting for you

Here’s a clip from that Barack Obama rally yesterday, where the former president criticised the sitting president’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.

Obama said that Trump was complaining “that people are too focused on Covid. He said this at one of his rallies ‘Covid, Covid, Covid’, he is complaining. He is jealous of Covid’s media coverage.”

More seriously, Obama said: “If he had been focused on Covid from the beginning, cases would not be reaching record highs across the country this week, the White House would not be having its second outbreak in a month.

Key events so far…

I’m Martin Belam, and I approve this message. You can get in touch with me at martin.belam@theguardian.com

The two largest US flight attendant unions, representing more than 75,000 workers, endorsed Democratic candidate Joe Biden on Tuesday ahead of the US presidential election next week, Reuters reports:

The unions have been pressing Congress and Republican President Donald Trump to back $25 billion in additional payroll assistance to prevent 32,000 airline furloughs.

In September, flight attendants, airline pilots and other aviation workers hold a protest organized by the Association of Flight Attendants urging the US Congress to pass a Covid-19 relief package and extend the Paycheck Support Program to save aviation jobs.
In September, flight attendants, airline pilots and other aviation workers hold a protest organized by the Association of Flight Attendants urging the US Congress to pass a Covid-19 relief package and extend the Paycheck Support Program to save aviation jobs. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

The Association of Professional Flight Attendants, representing the 27,000 American Airlines flight attendants, and the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA that represents about 50,000 workers at 20 airlines, said in separate statements they were endorsing Biden.

Asked about the timing of the endorsement, AFA-CWA International President Sara Nelson said: “The complete and total failure of this president on any plan around coronavirus, putting our lives in danger and now putting tens of thousands of us out of work with no hope for fixing that gives us the space to do what we normally would be doing this time of year.”

In addition to quipping that Donald Trump was “jealous of Covid’s media coverage,” Barack Obama in Florida on Tuesday also had this go at Jared Kushner, who said Monday that Trump wants to help African Americans but they have to “want to be successful”:

Ivanka Trump meets with students at the SLAM Academy, Miami, Florida.
Ivanka Trump meets with students at the SLAM Academy, Miami, Florida. Photograph: JLN Photography/REX/Shutterstock
Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a drive-in rally at Cellairis Amphitheatre in Atlanta, Georgia.
Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a drive-in rally at Cellairis Amphitheatre in Atlanta, Georgia. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP
Supporters watch a video of U.S. President Donald Trump while waiting in a cold rain for his arrival at a campaign rally at Capital Region International Airport October 27, 2020 in Lansing, Michigan.
Supporters watch a video of U.S. President Donald Trump while waiting in a cold rain for his arrival at a campaign rally at Capital Region International Airport October 27, 2020 in Lansing, Michigan. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Entertainer and Michigan native Ted Nugent performs the Star Spangled Banner during a campaign rally for U.S. President Donald Trump at Capital Region International Airport October 27, 2020 in Lansing, Michigan.
Entertainer and Michigan native Ted Nugent performs the Star Spangled Banner during a campaign rally for U.S. President Donald Trump at Capital Region International Airport October 27, 2020 in Lansing, Michigan. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The architect of Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policy, senior adviser Stephen Miller, is said to have a drawer full of executive orders ready to be signed in “shock and awe” style if Trump is re-elected.

The former homeland security department chief of staff, Miles Taylor, said this wishlist was reserved for the second term because it included policies that were too unpopular for a president seeking re-election.

This comes as no surprise to those who have watched and worried as legal pathways to US immigration shut under Trump, and who wonder not just about for more years of him as president, but also of four more years with Miller at his side.

In July, at the White House.
In July, at the White House. Photograph: Chris Kleponis/EPA

The 35-year-old has managed to keep his position as a senior adviser to the president after being outed for having an affinity for white nationalism and becoming synonymous with unpopular Trump administration policies such as family separation – when thousands of children were taken away from their parents at the southern border to deter would-be migrants. Three years later, more than 500 kids are still yet to be reunited with their parents.

Jean Guerrero, author of the Miller biography Hatemonger, told the Guardian: “There’s a number of things they have been cautious about because of the legal and political risks in the first term and I think that in a second term you would see Stephen Miller get much freer rein when it comes to his wishlist of items.”

Read the full piece:

If Joe Biden wins the 2020 US election against Donald Trump next week, the new president-elect will face enormous pressures to implement a laundry list of priorities on a range of issues from foreign policy to the climate crisis, reversing many of the stark changes implemented by his predecessor.

But Biden’s first and most pressing task for his first 100 days in the White House would be to roll out a new nationwide plan to fight the coronavirus crisis, which has claimed more than 220,000 lives in the US and infected millions – more than any other country in the world – as well as taking steps to fix the disastrous economic fallout.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden waves to supporters as he finishes speaking during a drive-in campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden waves to supporters as he finishes speaking during a drive-in campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

And, while the new president might be fresh from victory, the moderate Biden will also have to wrangle with his own side – a Democratic party with an increasingly influential liberal wing, hungry for major institutional changes to try to answer some of the most urgent questions over the country’s future.

“He basically has to do something historic,” said Saikat Chakrabarti, a Democratic activist and former chief of staff to the progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “He’s being handed a depression, a pandemic, and he’s being elected on a mandate to actually solve this stuff and do something big.”

Read the full piece:

The Trump administration is using tax dollars and federal agency resources to produce campaign videos highlighting what the videos claim are Trump administration “accomplishments”.

We use the scare quotes because the White House is currently circulating a document of “Trump administration highlights” in the areas of science and technology that touts its response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump sees no line between what belongs to the people – the federal government – and what belongs to him, having used the White House to stage campaign events and even turning the confirmation of a supreme court justice into a campaign photo shoot with the White House as backdrop.

Proud moment.
Proud moment. Photograph: White House/ZUMA Wire/REX/Shutterstock

With six days remaining in the race – once upon a time plenty of time to get an envelope across town or even across a state – elections officials in some states are advising voters not to rely on the US postal service to get their mail-in ballots in on time.

Hand-deliver your ballots, voters are told. Democratic groups – and public figures like former attorney general Eric Holder – have been advising supporters to do the same.

Attendees of a late-night Trump rally at the airport in Omaha, Nebraska, have been stranded for a time in the cold at the site because of limited traffic flow on the two-lane road that accesses the private east side of the airport where the rally was held.

A large portion of the crowd, estimated to be in the thousands, remained at the site waiting on buses hours after Trump’s plane had departed, according to reporters on the scene. Outside temps are about at the freezing point.

Trump is in Omaha because it shares a media market with a lot of Iowa, where Trump appears to be trailing Biden despite winning the state in 2016 by almost 10 points. Also, Nebraska splits its electoral votes by congressional district – Maine does too but every other state is winner-takes-all – and the second congressional district in Douglas County there is polling strongly for Biden, potentially giving the Democrat its one electoral vote, as it did for Obama in 2008.

[Note: we’ve corrected an earlier version of this post that had the 2016 margin in the presidential election in Iowa wrong, Trump won the state by about 10 points.]

Updated

A second night of protests unfolded in Philadelphia last night over the police killing of Walter Wallace Jr.

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.

As a side note, the election result in Philadelphia could determine the outcome of the entire presidential race. Biden needs a strong Democratic turnout in the city and its suburbs to overcome what is expected to be a Trump lead elsewhere. Pennsylvania looks from the polls like the state most likely to put one candidate or the other over the top.

Updated

A note to readers hungry for a quick deep dive into election news this morning – our Tuesday round-the-clock blog has just been buttoned up, and is full of rich content from throughout the day, culminating with a summary just now by my colleague Maanvi Singh (@maanvissingh) – check it out!

Hello and welcome to our round-the-clock rolling coverage of the 2020 US election. Everyone is looking toward Tuesday, but the election is already happening in a big way, with more than 70m people having voted early so far. That’s more than half of the roughly 130m people who voted for the two major-party candidates in the 2016 election – and we still have six days to go until an election day, when a big vote is also anticipated.

Donald Trump held a trio of rallies yesterday in the midwest, while Joe Biden took a turn through Georgia, an aspirational pickup state for the Democrats. Also out on the campaign trail was Barack Obama, who had this to say about Trump’s constant complaining about the prominence in the headlines of the coronavirus pandemic: “He’s jealous of Covid’s media coverage.”

The Trump campaign account was hacked briefly, and made to read: “the world has enough of the fake news spreaded [sic] daily by president donald j trump”. Federal authorities are investigating. Earlier this autumn Dutch media reported that a researcher gained access to Trump’s twitter account by guessing the password: maga2020!

The outlook in the coronavirus crisis in the United States continues to be dire, with nearly half a million cases recorded in the last week. But the White House issued a document of “Trump administration highlights” in the areas of science and technology – and touted its response to the coronavirus pandemic:

The policies enacted and investments made by the Administration have equipped researchers, health professionals, and many others with the tools to tackle today’s challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and have prepared the Nation for whatever the future holds.

Thank you for joining us today!

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