Summary
Thanks for following Joanna Walters, Joan E Greve, Martin Belam, Tom McCarthy and I throughout the day. Here’s what’s happened today:
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The US surpassed 9 million cases of coronavirus. According to Johns Hopkins University, 9,043,957 Americans have been diagnosed with coronavirus since the start of the pandemic. The country hit the grim milestone one day after setting a new single-day record in new cases, amid surges in dozens of states.
- Trump falsely claimed doctors are diagnosing more cases of coronavirus to bolster their paychecks. “Our doctors get more money if someone dies from Covid. You know that, right? I mean, our doctors are very smart people,” Trump said at his rally in Michigan. In reality, health experts say the US death toll likely undercounts how many Americans have died of coronavirus.
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Joe Biden and Donald Trump both campaigned in the Midwest, with just four days to go until election day. Trump stopped in Michigan and Biden in Iowa, and they held starkly different in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
- Texas surpassed its total 2016 vote count with early voting. As of today, Texans have already returned a record 9,042,066 ballots, according to the US Elections Project. Kamala Harris campaigned in the state today, ending with a rally in Houston.
- Trump criticized the supreme court for upholding an absentee ballot extension in North Carolina. The president said it was “crazy” that the justices ruled to allow North Carolina election officials to count ballots as long as they are postmarked by election day.
Donald Trump’s environment agency “actually seems to have a war on the environment”, has been “utterly untenable”, and has brought about “deeply, deeply troubling times”, according to three administrators appointed under past presidents.
Reflecting on Trump’s dozens of attacks on core environmental protections, a fourth put it another way: “[I’m] really god damned pissed off – and that’s being kind.”
The former environment administrators, two Republicans and two Democrats, shared their frustrations on a Joe Biden campaign call and in a separate conversation with reporters within the last several weeks. They are: Bill Reilly, from the George HW Bush administration; Christine Todd Whitman, from the George W Bush administration; Carol Browner, from the Bill Clinton administration, and Gina McCarthy, from the Barack Obama administration.
They have more than enough evidence to cite – Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has reversed rules meant to clean up the air, defend waterways from industrial pollution and fight climate change.
Trump has brought the agency to an all-time low, his critics argue. According to a report from the Environmental Protection Network of more than 500 former agency officials, the rollbacks have had “serious and measurable consequences, especially for already overburdened low-income communities and communities of color”.
The impacts will include “more respiratory illness and heart disease” that shortens lives; “decreased water quality” for drinking water, fisheries and recreation; “reduced Superfund cleanups,”; and “devastating consequences” from unchecked climate change, the group said.
Read more:
In Houston, Kamala Harris was joined by rapper Common as well as Tina Knowles, a designer and Beyoncé’s mother.
She spoke about the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout – and addressed the Black Lives Matter movement. The Democratic vice-presidential candidate had met with and invited to the rally three relatives of George Floyd – whose killing at the hands of police launched a wave of protests across the country.
“Joe Biden says we have got to reform policing,” she said – making a case for her running mate as president. “Joe has the courage to speak the truth about this.”
Harris and Biden have complicated career histories when it comes to policing. As a prosecutor, Harris supported increased criminalization of sex work and resisted action in key police abuse cases. Biden sponsored the 1994 Crime Bill, which accelerated racially-biased incarceration. Now, the Democrats have committed to reform, and Biden’s $20bn criminal justice plan seeks to cut down incarceration rates and increase government oversight of police.
Harris contrasted their approach with that of Donald Trump, who has taken a tough-on-crime stance and maligned protestors against police brutality.
The same Russian hackers that were accused of meddling in the 2016 US elections targeted Democratic officials this year, Reuters reports:
The group of Russian hackers accused of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election earlier this year targeted the email accounts of Democratic state parties in California and Indiana, and influential think tanks in Washington and New York, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The attempted intrusions, many of which were internally flagged by Microsoft Corp over the summer, were carried out by a group often nicknamed “Fancy Bear.” The hackers’ activity provides insight into how Russian intelligence is targeting the United States in the run-up to the Nov. 3 election.
The targets identified by Reuters, which include the Center for American Progress, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said they had not seen any evidence of successful hacking attempts.
Fancy Bear is controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency and was responsible for hacking the email accounts of Hillary Clinton’s staff in the run-up to the 2016 election, according to a Department of Justice indictment filed in 2018.
News of the Russian hacking activity follows last month’s announcement by Microsoft that Fancy Bear had attempted to hack more than 200 organizations, many of which the software company said were tied to the 2020 election.
Read more here.
Trump and the rise of white supremacist extremism
In May 2017, Demetria Hester was on her way home from work on a train in Portland, Oregon when Jeremy Christian, an avowed white supremacist, boarded and began shouting racist abuse. She says she told him to shut up. When they had got off the train, he threw a bottle that struck her in the face. The next day he killed two men and grievously injured a third. On the Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast, Demetria describes to Anushka Asthana how she felt the police responded to the incident that night and how she watched her attacker walk away without being questioned.
Earlier this year, a court in Portland found Jeremy Christian guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of first-degree attempted murder and sentenced to life without parole. But as the Guardian’s Lois Beckett tells Anushka, this is the extreme end of an ideology that has permeated all parts of US society, and that President Trump has repeatedly refused to condenm.
As Americans go to the polls next week they must assess the record of a president who has professed to be the “least racist person”. His own Department of Homeland Security describes white supremacists as posing the most persistent and lethal terror threat in the country.
Will Arizona's suburbs abandon the party of Trump?
The president won narrowly in Maricopa county, Arizona in 2016. Polls show his support is draining – and fellow Republicans are at risk.
Over the last four years, Republicans have watched their support collapse in suburbs across the country, as the president’s divisive rhetoric and incendiary behavior alienates women, college graduates and independent voters. But as Trump continues to downplay the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic, even after more than 225,000 deaths nationwide and as cases continue to climb, his conduct is imperiling not only his own re-election campaign, but his entire party.
Read more in the latest installment of the special Guardian series, Phoenix Rising:
In Washington state, protesters gathered at a memorial for Kevin E Peterson Jr, a former football player with a baby daughter, whose family has identified him as the young Black man that sheriff’s deputies shot Thursday evening in a bank parking lot.
Peterson was reportedly shot while he was on the phone with his partner.
His father Kevin Peterson Sr told the Oregonian that he had waited at the shooting scene overnight to be able to identify his son. “He wasn’t a problem child at all,” Peterson Sr told the newspaper. “He was a good kid.”
Community members left flowers and candles at Peterson Jr’s memorial site tonight.
Signs on the fence read “No Justice No Peace” & “Stop Stealing Black Lives”. #koin6news #Washington #PDX #PNW pic.twitter.com/f4NCmHdEIv
— Jennifer Dowling (@JenDowlingKoin6) October 31, 2020
Read more:
Unions discussing general strike if Trump refuses to accept Biden victory
Steven Greenhouse reports:
US unions have begun discussing the idea of a general strike if Donald Trump refuses to accept an election result showing a Joe Biden victory.
Such a move would be unprecedented in the modern era. There has not been a general strike in the United States since 1946 – and that was restricted to Oakland, California.
The local labor federation in Rochester, New York, was the first union group to officially support the idea. Union federations in Seattle and in western Massachusetts have followed suit, approving resolutions saying a general strike should be considered if Trump seeks to subvert the election outcome.
Dan Maloney, president of the Rochester-Genesee Valley Area Labor Federation, said his 100,000-member group adopted the resolution to get people discussing the idea – from local unions to the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main labor federation which represents more than 12.5 million people.
On 8 October, the Rochester federation voted to support preparing for and holding “a general strike of all working people, if necessary, to ensure a constitutionally mandated peaceful transition of power as a result of the 2020 presidential elections”. The union leaders voted to stand “firmly in opposition to any effort to subvert, distort, misrepresent or disregard the final outcome” of the election.
The Rochester move spurred discussion and debate of a possible general strike in union after union, even though some labor leaders see it as a drastic, hard-to-pull-off action. “The idea has gotten a lot more legs than I ever thought it would,” Maloney told the Guardian. “Our democracy is in jeopardy of a wannabe dictator. It’s time to be counted and do whatever it takes to remove him from office if he attempts to retain power against the will of the American people.”
Maloney said that in a 22 October call with labor leaders, Richard Trumka, the AFL-CIO’s president, stressed that until 3 November, unions should overwhelmingly focus on maximizing voter turnout for Biden. After that, Trumka said, unions can focus on what to do if Trump resists a peaceful transition.
The AFL-CIO’s executive council, approved a resolution on 19 October saying: “Democracies are not, in the last analysis, protected by judges or lawyers, reporters or publishers. The survival of democracy depends on the determination of working people to defend it. And America’s labor movement is indeed determined to defend our democratic republic.”
Read more:
Updated
Guam goes to the polls but votes won’t matter.
Mar-Vic Cagurangan reports:
Politics is a favourite sport on the streets of Hagatna, where voters are preparing for the US elections.
Billboards adorn every street corner and conversations are dominated by candidates and their policies. But when Guamanians go to the polls on 3 November and mark down their preference for president, their “votes” won’t count.
Despite being American citizens, an anomaly in US law means the residents of the island, which lies in the Pacific Ocean 8,000 miles from Washington, have no say as to who runs their country.
They vote for a local legislature, a governor, and a delegate to the US House of Representatives – a delegate who cannot vote – but their choice for president, marked on the same ballot, carries no weight.
Guam’s is a straw poll: a non-binding four-yearly exercise that serves merely as an early barometer for how the rest of the nation will vote.
Guam residents are among the 4 million disenfranchised Americans living in US territories who can’t vote for president. And being left out of the election stings.
“I am deeply unhappy that as a US citizen formerly residing on the mainland, I have to give up my voting rights for president simply by moving to another part of the US,” James Hofman, a corporate lawyer who moved to Guam from California in 2006, told the Guardian.
Read more:
Updated
Kamala Harris, meanwhile, is in Texas.
Speaking briefly with reporters in Houston, Harris responded to a question about why Biden wasn’t campaigning in the state.
“We’re putting a lot of resources into Texas,” she said, according to the press poll report. “We understand that first of all the people of Texas - Texas has so much at stake in this election and they deserve to be heard, they deserve to be engaged by us because we intend to earn every vote.”
No Democrat has carried Texas since 1978, but the solidly red state may have caught a purple tinge this year. Still, neither Trump nor Biden have plans to campaign in the state ahead of election day – with the Biden campaign instead dispatching Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff, as well as Biden’s wife Jill Biden, and several surrogates and allies.
Texas’ early votes so far have exceeded the tolal 8.9m votes cast in 2016 – in part because Democratic activists fought to extend early voting by a week.
Updated
In Wisconsin, Joe Biden – speaking while wearing a mask – kept focused on the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’re going to bring the Republicans and Democrats together” to pass an economic relief bill, he told supporters. “I’m not going to shut down the economy, I’m going to shut down the virus.”
It’s a line Biden also tweeted out earlier today, responding to Trump’s attack lines.
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Donald Trump was uncharacteristically brief – speaking for just over 20 minutes in Rochester, Minnesota. He complained several times that local authorities only allowed 250 people to attend.
New record for @realDonaldTrump. 21 minutes, 49 seconds in Rochester, MN. That's officially the shortest in-person campaign rally of his presidency.
— Factba.se (@FactbaseFeed) October 30, 2020
Next closest: 37 min, 55 sec in Nashville on March 15, 2017.
Transcript coming faster than normal. https://t.co/4Zy7NReBM2
In the New York Times, Ron Suskind interviewed current and former Trump administration officials and aides who worried about what the president would do to keep his grip on power.
They “are worried that the president could use the power of the government – the one they all serve or served within – to keep himself in office or to create favorable terms for negotiating his exit”, Suskin writes.
They are worried that the president could use the power of the government – the one they all serve or served within – to keep himself in office or to create favorable terms for negotiating his exit from the White House. Like many other experts inside and outside the government, they are also concerned about foreign adversaries using the internet to sow chaos, exacerbate divisions and undermine our democratic process.
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Many of the officials I spoke to came back to one idea: You don’t know Donald Trump like we do. Even though they can’t predict exactly what will happen, their concerns range from the president welcoming, then leveraging, foreign interference in the election, to encouraging havoc that grows into conflagrations that would merit his calling upon US forces. Because he is now surrounded by loyalists, they say, there is no one to try to tell an impulsive man what he should or shouldn’t do.
“That guy you saw in the debate,” a second former senior intelligence official told me, after the first debate, when the president offered one of the most astonishing performances of any leader in modern American history – bullying, ridiculing, manic, boasting, fabricating, relentlessly interrupting and talking over his opponent. “That’s really him. Not the myth that’s been created. That’s Trump.”
Read more here.
Indeed, political strategists, academics journalists are all anxiously awaiting election day, and wondering whether a president who has sown disinformation about voting, and whose political party is working to suppress Americans access to voting will step down easily, if polls and predictions that find his opponent leading come to fruition.
Read more opinion and analysis from the Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi:
Updated
Twitter updated its policies around hacked materials, the company announced Friday, lifting restrictions that were placed on the account of the New York Post after it published a controversial story a few weeks ago.
The Guardian’s Kari Paul reports:
It is the latest move in an ongoing saga that called into question the moderation policies of social media platforms. Both Twitter and Facebook took measures to limit the spread of an article published by the New York Post on 14 October, which was reported based on documents gleaned from an abandoned computer formerly belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
“Our policies are living documents,” the company shared in a tweet on Friday. “We’re willing to update and adjust them when we encounter new scenarios or receive important feedback from the public. One such example is the recent change to our Hacked Materials Policy and its impact on accounts like the New York Post.”
Twitter’s ban on the story marked the first time the company has directly limited the spread of information from a news site, as it works to address misinformation ahead of the 2020 elections.
The blocking of the New York Post story was seen by some Republicans as censorship of conservative speech or a move favoring Biden over his opponent Donald Trump. Twitter’s reversal may have been a response to the Senate hearing on Wednesday, in which CEO Jack Dorsey was excoriated by Republican lawmakers.
“Who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear?” Cruz asked Dorsey, asserting that Twitter was functioning as “a Democratic super PAC.”
The New York Post, whose Twitter account remained silent following the limits placed on it on 14 October, resumed Tweeting on Friday evening. It said it has gained nearly 190,000 followers in the few weeks since it was blocked.
Updated
Hi there, it’s Maanvi – blogging from the West Coast.
Drew Ferguson, a representative of Georgia and the House Republican Chief Deputy Whip has tested positive for Covid-19.
He said he took a diagnostic test after experiencing symptoms and is self-quarantining. He and Georgia governor Brian Kemp – who said he has been exposed to the virus – were both at a rally in Manchester on Tuesday, speaking with a largely maskless crowd. Georgia Public Broadcasting captured a photo of the two men shaking hands.
— Drew Ferguson (@RepDrewFerguson) October 30, 2020
Updated
The campaign trail race continues. I’m handing over to my colleague in California now, Maanvi Singh, who will take you through developments over the next few hours, so stay tuned.
Donald Trump is just beginning to speak in Rochester, Minnesota, after complaining mightily on the way in about crowd restrictions because of coronavirus.
Joe Biden will be speaking in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, shortly, as the two candidates wrap up a busy Friday in the heartland.
The National Guard Bureau has established a new unit made up mostly of military policemen that could be dispatched to help quell unrest in coming days, after a turbulent summer in which National Guard members were deployed to several cities, the Washington Post reports.
The unit, which also could be used to respond to natural disasters and other missions, was formed in September and initially described as a rapid-reaction force. But as one of the most divisive elections in American history closes in, National Guard officials have softened how they characterize the service members, instead referring to them as “regional response units.”
A National Guard official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said the new name more accurately details their mission. But the shift away from language used in war also hints at the complicated situation the National Guard could face, as President Trump signals that he might not accept the results of the election if he loses.
National Guard members, who are organized within each state and territory and typically commanded by their governor, could be called upon to perform crowd control, safeguard landmarks or enforce curfews, based on roles they already have had this year. Some of them also could be deployed to the nation’s capital, if Trump decides to repeat his plan from June and amass a military force in Washington that teams with federal and local law enforcement.
The new response unit, with a total of about 600 members split between Alabama and Arizona, is not large enough to provide a response like the one Washington saw in June. First reported on by the Associated Press this month, it could provide an initial wave of extra support in states where there is unrest or be used in the nation’s capital, where the Trump administration has broader control because of the city’s status as a federal jurisdiction.
As we reported earlier today, what military brass are really hoping for is a decisive result.
Updated
Political change is afoot in Arizona. Well worth a read this weekend, #ICYMI, is the Guardian’s special Phoenix Rising series this week.
My colleagues Lauren Gambino and Maanvi Singh zeroed in on some topical voting trends in the Grand Canyon state to find out whether it will become the graveyard of Trumpism.
Here’s Lauren a little earlier, on the late Arizona Republican Senator John McCain’s widow, who recently endorsed Joe Biden, and one of the pieces in the series:
Cindy McCain is in so many ways an example of the trends reshaping Arizona politics. https://t.co/7xSALzJbIG https://t.co/PKAV2mZRzM
— Lauren Gambino (@laurenegambino) October 30, 2020
Once in a blue moon?
Well, you’re in luck, this is a blue moon month - there was a full moon on October 1 and there’s one tomorrow, too, October 31.
And the reward, if you’re a Democrat and a music fan, is that Stevie Wonder is going to rally with Joe Biden and Barack Obama tomorrow in Detroit.
Biden and Obama will campaign together in Flint, Michigan, first, for a get-out-the-vote rally, then proceed to the Motor City to be joined by Wonder, a home grown Michigander and Motown legend, as my colleague, Daniel Strauss, noted earlier:
The Biden campaign announces today that Stevie Wonder will join former President Obama and former vice President Biden in Michigan this weekend. pic.twitter.com/FGQJWWMFDH
— Daniel Strauss (@DanielStrauss4) October 30, 2020
George Conway, who’s very much back on Twitter, likes this art.
— George Conway (@gtconway3d) October 30, 2020
Here’s a reminder of the tumult in the Conway household this summer.
WH coronavirus expert Birx warns of 'broad surge'
The White House coronavirus task force coordinator, Deborah Birx, has, like other prominent public health officials and experts in recent days, explicitly and unequivocally contradicted Donald Trump’s public prognosis on the pandemic in the US.
Birx warned the nation’s governors of a “broad surge” of the Covid-19 pandemic across the country as the weather cools, reversing the president’s repeated claims that the US is “rounding the turn” towards the end.
CBS is reporting that Birx said on the latest call that nearly one-third of the nation is in a Covid-19 hot spot, and things aren’t getting any better as people turn to indoor activities.
“This is a broad surge across every state where it is cooling,” Birx said. “We’re learning from the far north about how dramatic that spread can be, and we do not see yet improvements in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota or Wisconsin.” CBS further reports that:
The pandemic will only plateau if “every single person in your states” takes wearing masks, social distancing and hygiene seriously, Birx said on the call, which was obtained by CBS News. She told governors that people must decrease indoor gatherings with family and friends. The goal is to “form a bridge of human behavior change over the next few weeks,” she said.
Even as the pandemic rages across the country, the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force has become less visible and less active. “Nothing of substance” is happening with the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force, but the president doesn’t want to deal with the bad press of disbanding the group, so it continues, even if only symbolically, according to a source familiar with the situation. The task force now only meets once a week.
Last Sunday, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows admitted that the Trump administration is not going to control the pandemic.
The US is now on its way to the next stage, it seems - a full-blown national coronavirus crisis that will rage for the next few months regardless of the outcome of the election.
Updated
With just four days remaining in the US presidential campaign, more than 85 million Americans have already cast ballots.
This includes nine million in Texas, where the secretary of state’s office on Friday said early voting had eclipsed total turnout from 2016, Reuters writes.
Early voting has been setting records across the United States, with nationwide turnout passing 60% of the 2016 total, according to the US Elections Project at the University of Florida.
But Texas is just the second state, after Hawaii, to break the full-year record before Tuesday’s Election Day.
The unprecedented level of early voting reflects both intense interest in the contest between Republican Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden, as well as a desire on the part of many voters to avoid exposure to the coronavirus in crowds on Tuesday.
More than 20 million Americans who had voted early as of Friday did not vote in the 2016 election, according to TargetSmart, a Democratic analytics firm.
Friday is the final day of early voting in several states across the country, including Georgia and Arizona.
Here’s a take today on voting in Georgia:
Hundreds of people line up to vote at the Gwinnett County Fairgrounds on the final day of early voting in Lawrenceville, Georgia. #VOTE #EarlyVoting pic.twitter.com/UnCfnWX54v
— Justin Sullivan (@sullyfoto) October 30, 2020
Texas, the nation’s second most populous state, hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since 1976, but opinion polls show Joe Biden is leading among the voters who have helped set the unprecedented early vote levels.
Polls also show Biden effectively tied with Trump in Texas, whose 38 Electoral College votes make it a prize for either candidate seeking the 270 minimum votes needed to win.
Harris County, the state’s biggest, which includes Houston and has become a Democratic stronghold in recent years, opened eight 24-hour voting locations on Thursday, helping boost the turnout numbers to their record level on Friday.
Biden’s running mate, US Senator Kamala Harris of California, is visiting Texas today.
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg plans to spend $15 million in the state and Ohio in a last-minute bid to flip both Republican-leaning states.
About that comment in Michigan from the president earlier where he slammed doctors with a false implication that they are fiddling the numbers and profiting from coronavirus deaths, and his repeated, misleading messages about data, my health reporter colleague, Jessica Glenza, has this clarity:
Donald Trump has – again – falsely claimed the United States is over-counting the number of people who have died of Covid-19. In fact, the United States is likely under-counting deaths.
“You know, in Germany, if you have a bad heart and you’re ready to die, or if you have cancer and you’re going to be dying soon, and you catch Covid that happens, we mark it down to Covid. Our doctors get more money if somebody dies of Covid,” Trump said. He continued: “With us, when in doubt choose Covid.”
Multiple studies have shown the US is almost certainly under-counting the true toll of Covid-19. Scientists studying population health measure the impact of pandemics, such as Covid-19 and the 1918 Spanish flu, by comparing expected deaths against actual deaths.
Here’s our Guardian colleague, Nina Lakhani:
Claiming doctors make money from Americans dying of Covid is up there with the worst lies Trump has ever spouted.
— Nina Lakhani (@ninalakhani) October 30, 2020
Updated
In several of his rallies this week, Donald Trump has accused the media of focusing on the coronavirus crisis only for political purposes, in order to damage him.
Barack Obama has trolled him for it in rallies in Florida, where the former president warned that America could not afford four more years of Trump and needed to put Joe Biden into the White House next week.
Once again, earlier today, the president complained that the headlines are all about “Covid, covid, covid”.
Here’s Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell’s riposte.
Judge orders Postal Service to get a wiggle on
A federal judge this afternoon ordered the US Postal Service (USPS) to adopt “extraordinary measures” at some processing locations to ensure the timely delivery of millions of ballots before Tuesday’s presidential election.
US district judge Emmet Sullivan said he was ordering the measures in places where election mail processing scores for completed ballots returned by voters were below 90% for at least two days from October 26-28.
The list includes Alabama, Alaska, Atlanta, central Pennsylvania, Colorado, Wyoming, Detroit, Fort Worth, Texas; Indiana; South Carolina; Louisiana; the Mid-Carolinas, Mississippi; northern New England and Oklahoma, among others, Reuters writes.
The measures are outlined in the Postal Service’s October 20 “Extraordinary Measures Memorandum.”
Washington state attorney general Bob Ferguson sought a hearing in a separate Postal Service case after data showed “consistently poor Election Mail performance data in certain regions.”
Ferguson said data showed on-time delivery of ballots sent by voters in Michigan’s Detroit district dipped as low as 57%, while national processing has been 93% or higher.
Postal Service spokesman Dave Partenheimer declined to comment, but the service issued a memo today outlining numerous extra measures it is taking to deliver ballots, including arranging for after-hours handoffs with boards of elections.
Starting today, employees can use the Express Mail network to get completed ballots returned by voters entered close to or on Election Day, November 3, to their intended destination.
The Postal Service does not recommend mailing ballots less than seven days before state deadlines.
Some states accept ballots if postmarked by Election Day, while others require actual receipt by then.
Yesterday, the Postal Service said it delivered 122 million blank and completed ballots ahead of Tuesday’s presidential election, in which there has been record early voting.
More than 85 million Americans have already cast ballots in the presidential election, according to the US Elections Project at the University of Florida.
Taking over from Joan Greve, it’s Joanna Walters here. The president is still talking in Wisconsin.
Donald Trump is enjoying himself in Green Bay, at one of his win-or-bust rallies before the election.
He just promised that a vaccine for coronavirus is coming “momentarily”, which is his new timeframe this week, following recent predictions that it was coming in a few weeks, hinting it would be before the election.
A safe and effective vaccine has not yet emerged from final trials in the US, although the top public health official on the White House coronavirus task force, Anthony Fauci, has said he is confident there will be a vaccine announced in the next few months.
Trump to Green Bay, while looking skyward: “I just want normal life. All I want in normal life.”
It’s the Trump administration wing and a prayer strategy.
Now he’s telling his regular anecdote about some guy saying Trump is the most famous person in the world, to which Trump responds no, Jesus Christ is.
Crowd loves it, cheering loudly. A few minutes ago they were chanting “we love you, we love you” to Trump.
Here’s my colleague David Smith on what Trump’s rallies mean to him: today’s article.
Today so far
That’s it from me today. My Guardian colleague, Joanna Walters, will take over the blog for the next couple of hours.
Here’s where the day stands so far:
- The US has surpassed 9 million cases of coronavirus. According to Johns Hopkins University, 9,007,298 Americans have been diagnosed with coronavirus since the start of the pandemic. The country hit the grim milestone one day after setting a new single-day record in new cases, amid surges in dozens of states.
- Trump falsely claimed doctors are diagnosing more cases of coronavirus to bolster their paychecks. “Our doctors get more money if someone dies from Covid. You know that, right? I mean, our doctors are very smart people,” Trump said at his rally in Michigan. In reality, health experts say the US death toll likely undercounts how many Americans have died of coronavirus.
- Joe Biden and Donald Trump are both campaigning in the Midwest today, with just four days to go until election day. Biden held a drive-in rally in Iowa and will soon speak in Minnesota, while Trump is holding a rally in Wisconsin now.
- Texas surpassed its total 2016 vote count with early voting. As of today, Texans have already returned a record 9,033,154 ballots, according to the US Elections Project.
- Trump criticized the supreme court for upholding an absentee ballot extension in North Carolina. The president said it was “crazy” that the justices ruled to allow North Carolina election officials to count ballots as long as they are postmarked by election day.
Joanna will have more coming up, so stay tuned.
Trump holds rally in Wisconsin amid coronavirus surge
Donald Trump has taken the stage for his campaign rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, as the state experiences a surge in coronavirus cases.
“We’re going to win Wisconsin,” Trump told the crowd. “You are so lucky I’m your president.”
Wisconsin has had the 3rd most coronavirus cases per capita of any state in the last week. Hospitalizations are rising here. Gov. Tony Evers has called the surge an “urgent crisis” and urged people to stay home.
— Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) October 30, 2020
This is the scene at Trump’s rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin: pic.twitter.com/7zGIs8FAWQ
Recent polls of Wisconsin, which Trump won by less than 1 point in 2016, have shown Joe Biden leading by an average of about 9 points, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Trump’s visit to Wisconsin comes as coronavirus ravages the battleground state, with nearly 200 Wisconsinites dying of the virus in the past week alone.
Photos of Trump’s Green Bay rally showed no social distancing and infrequent mask usage.
AS CNN’s Ryan Struyk noted, this is the shortest amount of time it has taken for the US to confirm another million cases of coronavirus since the start of the pandemic.
It has been just 14 days since the US surpassed 8 million total cases, and the country hit 9 million cases today.
The US just reported 9 million coronavirus cases:
— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) October 30, 2020
0 to 1 million: 98 days
1 to 2 million: 44 days
2 to 3 million: 27 days
3 to 4 million: 15 days
4 to 5 million: 17 days
5 to 6 million: 22 days
6 to 7 million: 25 days
7 to 8 million: 21 days
8 to 9 million: 14 days
US surpasses 9 million coronavirus cases
The US has now confirmed more than 9 million cases of coronavirus since the start of the pandemic.
According to Johns Hopkins University, 9,007,298 Americans have been diagnosed with coronavirus as of today.
The grim milestone comes one day after the US set another single-day record in new cases, confirming 88,521 cases yesterday alone.
The US coronavirus death toll stands at 229,293, which is far higher than any other country in the world.
Donald Trump continues to insist that US cases are surging because of increased testing, a claim he repeated at his Michigan campaign rally this afternoon.
But health experts disagree, noting the rise in cases is far outpacing testing in the country. They say the climbing case counts point to increased spread of the virus as the country heads into the colder months of the year.
Facebook is continuing its belated crackdown on the baseless antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory, NBC News’s Brandy Zadrozny reports.
The social media platform will begin limiting the “save our children” hashtag, which has been a hotbed for QAnon memes for several months now. Users will instead be directed to legitimate child safety organizations and resources.
New: Facebook extending QAnon crackdown to Save the Children. Starting today, spokesperson says FB will limit the "save our children" hashtag "given we've found that content tied to it is now associated with QAnon." Searches will instead bring up credible child safety resources.
— Brandy Zadrozny (@BrandyZadrozny) October 30, 2020
“Save the children” and “save our children” emerged over the summer as a kind of rebranding effort for the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose followers believe without evidence that Donald Trump is secretly fighting a global cabal of pedophiles. The hashtags served as an emotive and effective entry point for concerned parents into the conspiracy movement, inspiring dozens of protests across the US and Europe.
QAnon and “save our children” exploded in popularity on Facebook over the summer, in part thanks to Facebook’s own recommendation algorithms. The company finally banned the movement, which has repeatedly been linked to violence, in early October.
On Tuesday, Facebook said that its QAnon ban had resulted in the removal of 1,700 Facebook pages, 5,600 Facebook groups and 18,700 Instagram accounts.
Donald Trump attacked Joe Biden over his speech at a drive-in rally in Des Moines, Iowa, this afternoon.
“Biden’s speech is 90% made up stories and lies. Only broadcast on @FoxNews,” Trump said in a new tweet.
Biden’s speech is 90% made up stories and lies. Only broadcast on @FoxNews.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2020
The tweet seems to be a serious case of projection for Trump, who has been criticized for making many false claims about the coronavirus pandemic during his campaign speeches.
The president similarly complained earlier this week about Fox News broadcasting Barack Obama’s speech at a drive-in rally in Orlando, Florida.
In the speech, Obama accused Trump of being “jealous of Covid’s media coverage.”
Republican Georgia governor Brian Kemp and his wife have gone into quarantine after being exposed to someone who tested positive for Covid-19, his spokesman announced a little earlier today.
The spokesman, Cody Hall, said in a statement that Kemp and first lady Marty Kemp “were recently exposed to an individual who received a positive test result for Covid-19,” The Associated Press writes.
Hall said both have received a coronavirus test, though he did not say if they’d received the results yet.
Georgia has had more than 350,000 confirmed cases of the virus.
More than 7,900 people in the state have died after contracting the virus, according to data from the state Department of Public Health.
Kemp was a strong advocate for keeping businesses open in Georgia earlier in the pandemic.
Trump: 'Our doctors get more money if someone dies from Covid'
Donald Trump has now wrapped up his campaign rally in Waterford Township, Michigan.
During his speech, the president leveled an attack against the doctors who have been treating coronavirus patients on the frontline of this pandemic.
"Our doctors get more money if someone dies from Covid. You know that, right? I mean, our doctors are very smart people." -- Trump pushes a baseless conspiracy that greedy American health care workers are overcounting coronavirus deaths pic.twitter.com/fsajGTvvN3
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 30, 2020
“Our doctors get more money if someone dies from Covid. You know that, right? I mean, our doctors are very smart people,” Trump said, griping about those with comorbidities being counted as coronavirus victims.
That insulting claim is obviously not true, and it’s important to note that at least 625 US healthcare workers have died of coronavirus since the start of the pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Guardian and Kaiser Health News have profiled 247 healthcare workers for our “Lost on the frontline” series. Read some of their stories:
Updated
Joe Biden has concluded his speech at a drive-in rally in Des Moines, Iowa, his first of three such rallies today.
Here’s @JoeBiden speaking to Iowans in about 200 vehicles at state fairgrounds. It’s a drive-in campaign event. @WHO13news #iapolitics #BattlegroundState pic.twitter.com/xI51EL1XzD
— Dave Price (@idaveprice) October 30, 2020
Reflecting the odd nature of campaigning amid a global pandemic, Biden wrapped up his remarks by asking those sitting in the roughly 200 cars at the rally, “Honk if you want America to lead again.”
Amid a flurry of honks, Biden added, “Folks, we cannot afford another four years of Donald Trump.”
Biden noted Iowa handed him and Barack Obama two victories in 2008 and 2012, and he hopes to continue that winning streak on Tuesday.
Echoing his closing message in recent days, Biden said, “I’m running as a proud Democrat, but I’ll govern as an American president.”
Donald Trump once again falsely claimed that increased coronavirus testing was causing the country’s surge in new cases.
Complaining about the news coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, the president said, “You turn on the news: Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid. And you know, cases are up. Why are cases up? Because we test more than anybody in history. I mean, we have tests on top of tests.”
"You know, everything is Covid Covid Covid. You know that. You turn on the news, Covid Covid Covid Covid Covid. And you know, cases are up. Why are cases up? Because we test more than anyone in history" - Trump still hasn't figured out that coronavirus testing doesn't cause cases pic.twitter.com/nZuXUX4oi1
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 30, 2020
New coronavirus cases in the US are far outpacing testing, and health experts have blamed the climbing case numbers on increased spread as the country heads into the colder months of the year.
According to Johns Hopkins University, the US confirmed 88,521 new cases yesterday, setting a single-day record.
Joe Biden thanked Democratic Senate candidate Theresa Greenfield for introducing him at his drive-in rally in Des Moines, Iowa.
“You have no idea how much you’re going to make my night when you win,” Biden told Greenfield. “You are, as they say back in Scranton, you’re the real deal, kid.”
Biden then launched into a lengthy attack on Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
“The Iowa State fair was canceled for the first time since World War II — and Donald Trump has given up,” Biden said.
The Democrat also appeared optimistic about his chances of winning Iowa, as polls show him and Trump locked in a close race.
“We’re going to change the course the world, right here in Iowa,” Biden said, as cars honked their applause for him.
Biden holds drive-in rally in Des Moines
Joe Biden is now speaking at his drive-in rally in Des Moines, as polls show the Democratic nominee and the president locked in a close race in Iowa.
“Hello, Iowa! Hello, Polk county!” Biden said as he took the stage for his first campaign event in the state since the Democratic caucuses in February.
Biden jogs to take the stage at a drive-in rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. pic.twitter.com/gMiRpvNH1K
— Madeleine Rivera (@madeleinerivera) October 30, 2020
Biden was introduced by Democratic Senate candidate Theresa Greenfield, who is also running neck and neck with Republican incumbent Joni Ernst in their race.
Greenfield predicted her race against Ernst would be a “donnybrook” all the way until election day, as rally attendees “applauded” (honked) to show their support.
Donald Trump mocked Fox News host Laura Ingraham for wearing a mask at his Michigan rally.
The President says Laura Ingraham is at the rally wearing a mask pic.twitter.com/zJZPqTALrB
— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) October 30, 2020
“I believe Laura Ingraham is here someplace,” the president said, scanning the crowd.
When the president spotted Ingraham, he told her, “I can’t recognize you. Is that a mask? No way, are you wearing a mask? I’ve never seen her in a mask.”
Trump added, “She’s being very politically correct.”
As a reminder, evidence has shown wearing face masks can help mitigate the spread of coronavirus. The president has been seen wearing a mask only a handful of times in recent months.
At his Michigan rally, Donald Trump again criticized Governor Gretchen Whitmer over her response to the coronavirus pandemic.
"You have to open up your states. We gotta get our governor to open up our state here, don't we? Don't worry, on November 4, all these Democrat-run states will be open," Trump says of Gretchen Whitmer, prompting "lock her up!" chants in Michigan. pic.twitter.com/K1Bz4N9dbm
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 30, 2020
“You have to open up your states. We’ve got to get our governor to open up our state here, don’t we?” Trump said.
The president’s comments were met with chants of “Lock her up!” from the rally crowd.
The rally comes less than a month after the FBI announced 14 people had been charged in connection to a foiled plot to kidnap Whitmer.
The president denied responsibility for the crowd’s chant, even as he chose not to criticize attendees for targeting the Democratic governor.
“Not me, see?” Trump said. “They blame me every time that happens, every time I mention her name.”
Trump holds campaign rally in Michigan
Donald Trump has taken the stage for his campaign rally in Waterford Township, Michigan, his first of three rallies in the Midwest today.
Trump, one day after a record number of US single-day coronavirus infections, says, "we're rounding the corner ... this was China's fault. Just remember it."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 30, 2020
He then looks to the heavens and adds, "that's all we want -- normal. Bring us back 7 months, that's what we want." pic.twitter.com/QIoqCDlvzw
The president opened his remarks by claiming a coronavirus vaccine would be approved within “a couple of weeks.”
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr Robert Redfield, previously said a coronavirus vaccine would not be widely available to the American public until mid to late 2021.
The president also once again claimed the country is “rounding the corner” in its coronavirus crisis, one day after the US reported a record-high number of new cases.
Joe Biden has arrived in Iowa, where he will speak at a drive-in rally in Des Moines this afternoon.
Biden’s back in Iowa! His first time back in the state since finishing fourth in the Iowa caucuses in February. How things have changed. pic.twitter.com/d60EGPDKDI
— Madeleine Rivera (@madeleinerivera) October 30, 2020
This marks Biden’s first trip back to the Hawkeye state since he came in fourth in the Iowa Democratic caucuses in February.
What a difference nine months can make. Since Biden’s disappointing performance in the caucuses, the country has been struck by coronavirus and the former vice president has won the Democratic nomination.
Now, with just four days to go until election day, Biden and Donald Trump are running neck and neck in Iowa, which the president won by 9 points in 2016.
Today so far
Here’s where the day stands so far:
- Joe Biden and Donald Trump are both campaigning in the Midwest today, with just four days to go until election day. Biden is holding events in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, while Trump is speaking at campaign rallies in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
- Texas surpassed its total 2016 vote count with early voting. As of today, Texans have already returned a record 9,009,850 ballots, according to the US Elections Project.
- Trump criticized the supreme court for upholding an absentee ballot extension in North Carolina. The president said it was “crazy” that the justices ruled to allow North Carolina election officials to count ballots as long as they are postmarked by election day.
The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.
Trump criticizes supreme court for allowing absentee ballot extension
Donald Trump lashed out against the supreme court for upholding an extension in North Carolina to count absentee ballots as long as they are postmarked by election day.
“This decision is CRAZY and so bad for our Country. Can you imagine what will happen during that nine day period. The Election should END on November 3rd,” Trump said in a tweet.
This decision is CRAZY and so bad for our Country. Can you imagine what will happen during that nine day period. The Election should END on November 3rd. https://t.co/Hkftv9Jp56
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2020
Again, the supreme court’s decision does not extend the election itself. It simply gives North Carolina election officials more time to count ballots as long as they are sent by election day.
Although the president has outlandishly demanded that the election be called on November 3, states actually have until December 8 (known as the “safe harbor” deadline) to finalize their vote tabulations.
Donald Trump’s final campaign rally before election day will be in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the president’s reelection campaign just announced.
Trump will hold five rallies across four battleground states -- North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin -- on Monday.
The president’s final campaign rally in 2016 was also in Grand Rapids, and Trump went on to win by less than 1 point.
“We’re hours away from a once-in-a-lifetime change,” Trump said at that 2016 rally. “We’re going to have real change, not Obama change.”
Updated
Kamala Harris is headed back to Georgia on Sunday, just two days before election day.
“On Sunday, November 1, Kamala Harris will travel to Georgia, and Goldsboro and Fayetteville, North Carolina,” the Biden campaign said in a press release.
Both Harris and Joe Biden have already paid visits to Georgia, a traditionally conservative state that Donald Trump won by 5 points in 2016.
Recent polls of Georgia have shown Biden and Trump running neck and neck in the state, with Biden pulling ahead by an average of about 2 points, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Speaking to reporters before leaving for his campaign swing through the Midwest today, Donald Trump also promised Congress would pass a coronavirus relief bill after the election.
“We will have a tremendous stimulus package immediately after the election,” the president said.
House speaker Nancy Pelosi has expressed openness to a lame-duck deal on coronavirus relief, in order to clear the way for Joe Biden if he is elected on Tuesday.
Trump also once again predicted Republicans would take back the House, even as election experts predict the party would lose more seats in the chamber.
“Nobody has done what we’ve done, even close. I think we’re going to have a great election,” Trump said, citing the “big crowds” at his rallies.
According to FiveThirtyEight, Trump is trailing Biden in national polls by an average of about 9 points, and the president is also down in key swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Trump said he has not yet finalized his election night plans, as reports indicate the president may stay at the White House while results roll in on Tuesday.
“We have a hotel,” the president told reporters before leaving for his campaign swing through the Midwest.
The president was expected to spend election night at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, but he expressed concerns about DC Mayor Muriel Bowser having “shut down” the city.
“If that’s the case, we’ll probably stay here,” Trump said, referring to the White House.
The New York Times reported Trump was considering moving his election night party from his hotel to the White House, amid concerns about him using his office for financial benefit.
The president’s son, Eric Trump, confirmed the likely change of plans in a Fox News interview this morning.
“No, we’re thinking about moving it, actually, over to the White House for — we’re looking at that right now, and it’s going to be a great night. It’s going to be a really, really beautiful night,” the younger Trump said.
Hawaii has also surpassed its total 2016 voting turnout as of today, four days before election day.
According to the US Elections Project, Hawaii voters have already cast 457,294 ballots in the election, representing about 105% of the state’s 2016 turnout.
Hawaii is one of five states -- as well as Colorado, Oregon, Utah, and Washington -- that automatically send mail-in ballots to all registered voters for every election.
In addition to Hawaii, Texas has already surpassed its total 2016 turnout as well, with Texas voters having already returned more than 9 million ballots.
Updated
The Guardian’s David Agren reports from Mexico City:
Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador identifies as leftist, dismissing his opponents as “conservatives”.
Donald Trump launched his 2016 bid for the US presidency by describing Mexican migrants as “rapists” and threatened economic ruin by ripping up a trade deals between Mexico, the United States and Canada.
But some of the Mexican president’s supporters are pulling for an unlikely candidate in the upcoming US election: Donald Trump.
“We want President Trump to stay in office. Why? Because there’s good communication between him and President López Obrador,” said Carolina Mayor, a veterinarian. “They understand each other perfectly because they’re nationalists. They’re nationalist presidents.”
Amlo, as Mexico’s president is known, has not commented on the election, saying he wants to stay out of US politics. But he has forged a surprisingly close relationship with Trump, going out of his way to praise the US president, and deploying the national guard to crack down on Central American migants.
Updated
An important reminder for election day: depending on when states count their absentee ballots, battleground states could dramatically swing from Donald Trump to Joe Biden (or vice versa) as results come in.
CNN sets the expectations for election night:
Likely shift from red to blue: Some people call this the ‘red mirage or the ‘blue shift,’ where early results favor Trump but later ballots even things out and might even put Biden ahead once all the results are tallied.
This dynamic is expected in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where they don’t process absentee ballots before Election Day. Early waves of results will likely come from ballots cast on Election Day and from outside the state’s population centers, which are expected to favor Trump. ...
Likely shift from blue to red: Some people call this the ‘blue mirage’ or the ‘red shift.’ This is when the first waves of results disproportionately favor Biden, only to be followed by more Trump-friendly ballots later on. This is most likely to occur in the states that start processing mail-ballots weeks before Election Day.
The most critical states where experts believe this will happen are Florida and North Carolina. Election officials in these states say the first results to become public after the polls close will be large batches of absentee ballots and in-person early votes, which have been quite favorable to Democrats. As the night drags on, Election Day ballots will trickle in, helping Trump’s margins.
As a reminder, Biden will win the electoral college if he can maintain control of every state Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and flip Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where polls show the Democrat leading.
Early voting update: nearly 84 million Americans have already voted in the election as of today, four days before election day.
According to the US Elections Project, 83,940,065 Americans have voted by mail or early in person, representing 60.9% of the country’s total 2016 turnout.
#earlyvote morning update 10/30
— Michael McDonald (@ElectProject) October 30, 2020
At least 83 million people have voted in the 2020 general election 🥳https://t.co/s8K2xFDeSA pic.twitter.com/ZRZViGFrRL
Texas has the highest level of turnout in comparison to its 2016 vote count, having already surpassed the total number of ballots cast in the last presidential election.
But California narrowly edges out Texas in terms of raw vote totals so far. As of today, 9,167,959 Californians have already cast their ballots, in comparison to 9,009,850 Texans.
Biden and Obama to hold drive-in rallies in Flint and Detroit on Saturday
The Biden campaign has released additional details about Joe Biden and Barack Obama’s joint campaign trip to the swing state of Michigan tomorrow.
Biden and Obama will hold two drive-in rallies in Flint and Detroit to encourage Michiganders to vote in the presidential election. The Flint event will be at 1.45pm ET, and the Detroit event is scheduled to begin at 5.30pm ET.
“President Obama and Joe Biden will travel to Michigan to discuss bringing Americans together to address the crises facing the country and winning the battle for the soul of the nation,” the Biden campaign said.
Obama has been hitting the campaign trail for his former running mate in recent days, most recently holding a drive-in rally in Orlando, Florida.
During the Orlando event, Obama criticized Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, accusing the president of being “jealous of Covid’s media coverage.”
Updated
Joe Biden is en route to the Midwest, where he will campaign in the swing states of Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin today.
"I don’t take anything for granted, we’re gonna work for every single vote up until the last minute," Biden says when asked if his trip to MN (a blue state) means he is concerned.
— Bo Erickson CBS (@BoKnowsNews) October 30, 2020
He is en route to campaign rallies in IA>MN>WI today. pic.twitter.com/N7OdbGW7fF
Speaking to reporters before boarding his campaign plane, Biden was asked why he is going to Minnesota, which Hillary Clinton narrowly won in 2016. Polls show Biden leading in Minnesota by an average of about 8 points, according to FiveThirtyEight.
“I’m not concerned. We’re going to be in Iowa, we’re going to be in Wisconsin, so I thought I’d stop in Minnesota,” Biden said. “I don’t take anything for granted. We’re going to work for every single vote up until the last minute.”
The Democratic nominee is traveling with one of his granddaughters, Maisy Biden. Biden traveled with his granddaughter Finnegan on Tuesday, and he went to Florida yesterday with his granddaughter Natalie.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will barnstorm the key battleground state of Pennsylvania on Monday, the day before election day.
The Biden campaign said in a press release, “Vice President Biden, Dr. [Jill] Biden, Senator Harris, and Mr. [Doug] Emhoff will hold events in the Keystone State to get out the vote while also discussing how to bring Americans together to address the crises facing the country and win the battle for the soul of the nation.”
Pennsylvania is crucial to Biden’s strategy for an electoral college win, and the Democrat’s focus on the state underscores that he believes it will be the tipping point in the race.
Donald Trump won Pennsylvania by less than 1 point in 2016, but recent polls have shown Biden leading in the state by an average of about 5 points, according to FiveThirtyEight.
This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Belam.
As Martin noted, Texas has now surpassed its total 2016 voting turnout, with residents having already returned a record 9,009,850 ballots as of today.
Harris county, the largest county in Texas and the home of Houston, celebrated hitting its total 2016 turnout in the traditional way: with more cowbell, of course.
It's time to EXPLORE THE SPACE IN THE ROOM because as of now, Harris County early voters have surpassed the total turnout from 2016. Keep voting tonight at eight 24-Hour Voting locations: https://t.co/s3HBl2J9bW #HarrisVotes #VoteEarly #24HourVoting pic.twitter.com/zZI2XuzgSh
— Harris County Clerk (@HarrisVotes) October 30, 2020
Connecticut’s Democratic senator Chris Murphy sums up what a lot of people appear to be thinking about Trump’s late-night Twitter antics.
I desperately want a president who is sleepy at 3am. So so badly. https://t.co/s6oig6G44q
— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) October 30, 2020
And that’s it from me. I’ll be back tomorrow. Joan E Greve will be along shortly to take you through the rest of the day…
Updated
The New York Times bring us this news about Trump’s election night plans – which have changed:
President Trump has called off plans to appear at the Trump International Hotel on election night and is likely to be at the White House instead, according to a person familiar with the plans.
Advisers had said privately that Mr. Trump was going to appear at his namesake hotel in Washington for an election night party for which his campaign had sent out multiple fund-raising solicitations to his supporters.
“November 3rd will go down in history as the night we won FOUR MORE YEARS. It will be absolutely EPIC, and the only thing that could make it better is having YOU there,” read one solicitation from the president that included an image of Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, under the words “Join us on election night.”
It was unclear why the plans had changed. But the prospect of the president appearing on the night of the election at the hotel was certain to reinforce concerns about Mr. Trump mingling the office with his business.
It would also reinforce questions about whether the hotel would be in violation of Washington coronavirus restrictions limiting gatherings to 50 people. And a party would have to be paid for by the campaign, which is facing a cash crunch in the final weeks of the race.
Read more here: New York Times – President Trump remakes his election night plans
Texas surpasses total 2016 turnout with early voting
Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report tells us that Texas has just surpassed its all-time record for votes cast.
Breaking: Texas just surpassed its 2016 total votes cast w/ one day of early voting & Election Day left to go.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) October 30, 2020
The state is reporting 9,009,850 votes already cast, vs. the all-time record of 8,969,226 in 2016. This is massive.
It should be safely Republican – Jimmy Carter in 1976 was the last time the state opted for a Democratic nominee. However, polls have had Trump’s lead down to as narrow as one point. Kamala Harris will be campaigning there today.
Updated
April Siese from CBS News has this from earlier today on the news that a Louisville police officer is to sue Kenneth Walker, the boyfriend of Breonna Taylor, for emotional distress, assault and battery. Breonna Taylor was killed by police on 13 March 2020. Nobody has faced any charges connected directly to her death. Siese reports:
An officer involved in the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor has filed a civil suit against the 26-year-old’s boyfriend for emotional distress, assault and battery on the night she was killed. The lawsuit claims Louisville Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly experienced “severe trauma, mental anguish, and emotional distress” because of Kenneth Walker’s actions on 13 March.
Mattingly and two other officers entered Taylor’s apartment early in the morning that day with a warrant in an attempt to carry out a drug investigation. Walker, a licensed gun owner who said he thought the officers were intruders, allegedly fired a shot that hit Mattingly in the leg. Police opened fire, killing Taylor. Taylor had no criminal record and no drugs were found.
“Walker’s conduct in shooting Mattingly is outrageous, intolerable, and offends all accepted standards of decency and morality,” the lawsuit said, citing one of the legal standards for intentional emotional distress.
Read more here: CBS News – Louisville police officer sues Kenneth Walker, boyfriend of Breonna Taylor, for emotional distress, assault and battery
Donald Trump, who only finished his last round of tweets at around 3am in DC, is back up and tweeting again.
He’s again claiming falsely that the US has more cases of coronavirus because it does more tests, and also that deaths are ‘way down’.
More Testing equals more Cases. We have best testing. Deaths WAY DOWN. Hospitals have great additional capacity! Doing much better than Europe. Therapeutics working!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2020
There are, of course, instant refutations in the replies, with charts showing that hospitalisations are up, and that while deaths are indeed lower, there are still around 1,000 Americans dying each day of Covid. That’s roughly one every ninety seconds.
No: “It's not just a function of testing”-@HHS_ASH
— Alex Howard (@digiphile) October 30, 2020
Turn off the TV, talk to doctors on @whitehouse task force, stop denying reality.
States reported a record number of new cases —88,452.
46,000+ people hospitalized.
1049 Americans died.https://t.co/iCZc3yNJSA
More will follow. pic.twitter.com/nkfrWarkEv
A pregnant Florida woman didn’t let labor stop her from casting her vote in the presidential election, refusing to go to the hospital until she filled out her ballot, report the Associated Press.
Officials with the Orange County Supervisor of Elections said the woman was already in labor when she arrived at the polling site with her husband Tuesday afternoon, news outlets reported.
Elections employee Karen Briceno Gonzalez said the husband asked for a ballot for his wife and later told the staff that she was in the car, in labor and refusing to go to the hospital until she was able to vote.
Briceno Gonzalez said she rushed outside to give the woman her ballot and check her ID. The staffer thought the woman would fill it out later, but while doing some controlled Lamaze breathing, the woman filled the ballot out right away.
Elections clerk Eileen Deliz said the couple never mentioned why the woman waited until she was in labor to cast her vote.
“Maybe she wanted to come in-person at one point and that’s why she was waiting, who knows. But she wouldn’t go to the hospital until she voted,” Deliz said.
Deliz said the unexpected incident delivered a bunch of smiles to the election workers.
“We are very, very busy, but when something like that happens it just makes our day,” Deliz said. “Every election cycle brings us a great little story.”
Officials said the woman’s husband later drove her to an Orlando hospital.
The couple were perhaps slightly lucky they weren’t trying to vote in Brooklyn, where lines on Friday morning were long and the weather was miserable.
Go Brooklyn! Hundreds in line to vote at 7am in miserable weather. Also go Nets! pic.twitter.com/GnJ9JlVt5v
— Marc Triola (@marctriola) October 30, 2020
Giovanni Russonello has this about Florida for the New York Times On Politics newsletter today.
Trump can count on the continued support of rural voters and white men, while Biden is almost guaranteed to carry strong support from women and African-American voters across the state.
Yet Biden is unlikely to hold on to Hillary Clinton’s strong showing with Latino voters. Instead, he’s looking to make up for it among some of the white voting blocs that Trump relied on in 2016, particularly suburbanites and older voters.
A batch of high-quality Florida polls arrived this week — probably some of the last that we’ll see before the election — and they all showed Biden with an advantage of three to six percentage points among the state’s likely voters. Taken together, the surveys put Biden in a strong position to pull together a winning coalition in Florida, which has successfully predicted the victor in the past six presidential elections.
There’s a note of caution though.
In each poll, the difference was within the margin of error, and the polling miss of 2016 — when Florida surveys overestimated Clinton’s support by a few points — should give us pause.
But don’t forget, earlier this week a piece in the Miami Herald pointed out that the state has a long experience administering mail-in ballots, and the ability to count them early. It could be that on the night, a swift decisive Biden victory in Florida will make count-wrangling in other swing states an irrelevance.
If you missed it yesterday, we published the latest episode of our Anywhere But Washington series.
In 2016, white evangelicals made up a quarter of all US voters. And 81% of them voted for Donald Trump. Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone headed to the pivotal battleground state of North Carolina to see if Trump’s religious base is showing signs of crumbling. They meet extreme evangelical pastors, travelling progressive preachers and the moral movement leader Rev William Barber.
Here’s Erin Schumaker and Arielle Mitropoulos for ABC News looking particularly at what has gone wrong with the coronavirus response in Massachusetts, where the daily case counts look similar to what the state was experiencing in May.
Residents have been wearing masks and the state has collected Covid-19 data and launched one of the nation’s first contact tracing programs. For months, the safety measures seemed to be working, but now, cases are on the rise once again. On Thursday, Massachusetts reported 1,243 new Covid-19 cases, according to the health department, marking the sixth day in a row it logged more than 1,000 single-day cases.
“The only silver lining is that the number of deaths has stayed fairly stable since the springtime,” said Dr. Howard Koh, a professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “But we also know that when cases go up, hospitalizations and ultimately deaths generally follow.”
Balancing the state’s response remains an ongoing issue – as is the broader federal response.
Dr. Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist and dean at the Boston University School of Public Health said “If you did a Melbourne-style lockdown, you would probably bring cases down.” But, noting that at one point last month, Massachusetts had the highest unemployment rate in the country. “That’s really hard,” he added.
As for places that could be improved, Galea pointed to testing. “Testing remains hampered by general federal chaos,” he said. “It’s hard to think of ways Massachusetts could be better in the vacuum, absent a broader federal strategy.”
Some of the blame for the rise is being directed at younger people.
While there’s evidence that people under the age of 30 are driving the rebound in new cases this fall, Galea doesn’t think the rise is related to Boston’s high density of universities, some of which have opened in person. “Transmissions are quite low,” he said of schools.
Instead, he pointed to informal gatherings, especially among young people. “Whether those can come under control is an open question,” Galea said. “It’s fluctuating day by day.”
Where the impact is felt most, though, is clear.
Boston, Massachusetts’ biggest city, has unsurprisingly led the state in Covid-19 infections. And similar to other cities around the country, those nearly 20,000 cases are concentrated in Black and brown neighborhoods.
“All the neighborhoods that are getting hit hardest are the lower-income neighborhoods, these are places where you have multi-generational households, you have many people who are essential workers, who are the ones having to bear the brunt,” Dr. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital, said.
Read more here: ABC News – Massachusetts’ COVID-19 response was science-based, so why are cases rising?
Here’s Rebecca Shabad for NBC News with a re-cap on those coronavirus comments by Donald Trump Jr last night.
Donald Trump Jr. falsely claimed Thursday that Covid-19 infection numbers have dwindled to “almost nothing,” despite there being around 1,000 deaths reported in the U.S. the same day.
In an interview on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle,” the president’s son said that medical experts who have been talking about a surge in cases are “truly morons.”
“I went through the CDC data, because I kept hearing about new infections, but I was like, ‘Well why aren’t they talking about this?’” Trump Jr. said. “Oh, oh, because the number is almost nothing. Because we’ve gotten control of this thing, we understand how it works. They have the therapeutics to be able to deal with this.”
“It’s gone to almost nothing,” he repeated
According to the Johns Hopkins university coronavirus tracking figures, the US yesterday recorded 971 deaths, and the highest ever level of new daily cases the university has noted, at 88,521.
Montana, Wyoming and Alaska have the steepest upwards curve, with cases increasing at a rate of over 20%. Louisiana is the only state in the whole of the US showing an increase rate of lower than 3%.
Read more here: NBC News – Donald Trump Jr. says Covid numbers are ‘almost nothing’ on day reporting 90,000 infected, 1,000 dead
Amy S. Rosenberg at the Philadelphia Inquirer has been in Delaware talking to people from Joe Biden’s home state about the Democratic nominee.
In Delaware, Biden is that ubiquitous homegrown pol it seems so many have met in person, or come close to meeting, or feel like they’ve met. Or maybe they’ve met Beau, when he spoke at their high school or served with their son in the Guard, or their daughter had Jill as a teacher, or they once sold Joe a Thunderbird. Biden’s a guy who has held Delawareans captive in a decades-long love-him-don’t-love-him relationship. As Biden is trying to finally vault to the top of his career goals, Delawareans are holding their breath.
The touches of that sentimental guy known as “Delaware Joe” are everywhere in a trip through the tiny state, from signs over twin garages of their Rehoboth home (Beau’s Gift and Forever Jill), to the counter at Janssen’s, the upscale market near the Biden home in Greenville, a suburb of Wilmington, where meat cutter Bill Keenan notes the “always polite” Jill favors the turkey patties with feta, lately with curbside pickup.
Walking on the Boardwalk earlier this week, Larry Hobbs, public works foreman in Rehoboth, said, “I see what he’s for. He seems to be a people person for real. Honest and transparent.” Hobbs says he views the crime bill Biden supported as a mistake, but, “we all make mistakes.”
Paul Fallon, who lives in Claymont, only met Biden once at a Memorial Day ceremony, where Biden, “came down and shook every hand.”
Standing behind an old “Delaware’s Joe Biden,” sign a bunch of which he says he found by chance one day, Fallon said, “I like him. I trust him.” He added: “I’d vote for a potato besides Trump.”
Read more here: Philadelphia Inquirer – Dinner at the Bidens: In Delaware, they all know Joe Biden up close
Americans have bought nearly 17m guns so far in 2020, more than in any other single year, according to estimates from a firearms analytics company.
Gun sales across the United States first jumped in the spring, driven by fears about the coronavirus pandemic, and spiked even higher in the summer, during massive racial justice protests across the country, prompted by police killings of black Americans.
“By August, we had exceeded last year’s total. By September, we exceeded the highest total ever,” said Jurgen Brauer, the chief economist of Small Arms Analytics, which produces widely-cited estimates of US gun sales.
The estimated number of guns sold in the US through the end of September 2020 is “not only more than last year, it’s more than any full year in the last 20 years we have records for”, Brauer said.
The previous record for estimated firearms sold in a single year was 16.6m in 2016, when Hillary Clinton ran for president against Donald Trump and endorsed a strong gun-control platform, he said.
The spike in gun sales comes amid rising tensions and intense political polarization. Citing “the current unrest”, Walmart removed guns and ammunition from display in stores this week, as a “precaution” against theft if stores are robbed, the Wall Street Journal reported. The retailer did not confirm when firearms and ammunition would be put back on display but said that customers could continue to buy guns and ammunition by request.
Read more of Lois Beckett’s report: Americans have bought record 17m guns in year of unrest, analysis finds
Very much more seriously, but still with a Halloween theme, the name of Breonna Taylor may have slipped down the national news agenda but she has not at all been forgotten in Louisville, where last night there was the 155th day of protest in the Kentucky city.
The local Courier Journal reports that last night about 35 protesters marched from the Louisville Free Public Library on York Street followed by supporters in cars during a “No Justice No Halloween” march in her honor. They have a photo gallery of the event.
I’ll just point you in the general direction of this…
Witches on TikTok – in other words, WitchTok – have already come together to cast hexes on police officers amid Black Lives Matter protests this year, and now they’re set to concentrate their collective energy on getting Joe Biden into the White House.
Conveniently, next week’s US presidential election almost coincides with a Halloween blue moon. According to a Medium post detailing the upcoming ritual, groups of witches will be able to harness this on the night of October 31 – as well as the night before the election – to perform a “Blue Wave” spell that will apparently help “wash away the corruption and injustice and wickedness of Donald Trump and the Republican Party in a peaceful transition of power”.
Read more on this somewhat unlikely turn of events here: Dazed & Confused – TikTok’s witches plan to cast a spell to help Biden win the election
US unions have begun discussing the idea of a general strike if Donald Trump refuses to accept an election results showing a Joe Biden victory.
Such a move would be unprecedented in the modern era. There has not been a general strike in the United States since 1946 – and that was restricted to Oakland, California.
The local labor federation in Rochester, New York, was the first union group to officially support the idea. Union federations in Seattle and in western Massachusetts have followed suit, approving resolutions saying a general strike should be considered if Trump seeks to subvert the election outcome.
Dan Maloney, president of the Rochester-Genesee Valley Area Labor Federation, said his 100,000-member group adopted the resolution to get people discussing the idea – from local unions to the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main labor federation which represents more than 12.5 million people.
On 8 October, the Rochester federation voted to support preparing for and holding “a general strike of all working people, if necessary, to ensure a constitutionally mandated peaceful transition of power as a result of the 2020 presidential elections.”. The union leaders voted to stand “firmly in opposition to any effort to subvert, distort, misrepresent or disregard the final outcome” of the election.
Read more of Steven Greenhouse’s report here: Unions discussing general strike if Trump refuses to accept Biden victory
“Vote Biden, get radical leftist Harris” has been a rallying cry of the Trump campaign. But Alexi McCammond has a more nuanced take here for Axios, looking at how the progressive side of the Democrats see her as a bridge to a party that is in “younger, more diverse and more liberal hands.”
Progressives want Biden to look outside of his own network when filling administration positions, and prioritize inclusion across the Democratic caucus over working with moderate Republicans.
“People believe Biden when he says ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘We need to address racism in our nation,’” Adrianne Shropshire, founder of BlackPAC, told Axios. “But they also believe he’s old school, and in order to solve these problems we actually need newer, progressive ideas — and voices that actually have some experience, direct or indirect, with the problems we’re talking about.”
“She’s going to put a racial and gender lens on everything that they talk about in their administration, and that’s been lacking,” said Glynda Carr, founder of Higher Heights for America PAC, which focuses on electing progressive Black women to public office.
Harris wasn’t a top choice for progressives during the Democratic presidential primary. But several who spoke with Axios for this story said there’s a feeling that she’s more accountable to their movement than Biden himself.
Read more here: Axios – Kamala Harris, the new left’s insider
Laila Lalami is the author of The Other Americans, and has written for us this morning a piece saying that “We who can vote have a powerful responsibility to those who can’t”
The disproportionate focus on presidential politics in our media obscures the fact that elections are about local choices as well. We choose sheriffs, district attorneys, state and local judges, and school board members, which is to say the people who will make decisions that directly affect how criminal justice is handled in our communities, how schools are run in our districts, or what textbooks are chosen for our children. Not voting means forfeiting the right to have a voice in policy decisions that affect us every day. The government isn’t just in the White House; it’s here in our streets, and the ballot is the only means we have to evaluate the public servants whose salaries we all pay, whether we choose to vote or not.
Then there are state propositions on the ballot. In California, where I live, voters can decide by simple referendum whether people who have served their felony convictions should regain voting rights, whether rent control should be expanded by local governments, and whether cash bail should be replaced by risk assessment for suspects in pretrial detention. In other words, we have in our hands the power to expand the franchise, protect people from eviction at a time of enormous financial strain, or reduce the number of people in pretrial detention. In each case, the lives of tens of thousands of people – our families, our friends, our neighbors – will be affected by the outcome, whatever it may be.
Read it here: Laila Lalami – We who can vote have a powerful responsibility to those who can’t
Sahil Kapur at NBC News has put up this morning the output from a 30 minute phone interview with Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller on the campaign’s second term plans for immigration. It must be said we haven’t had huge amounts of policy detail coming out of the White House in the run-up to the election. Kapur writes:
The objective, Miller said, is “raising and enhancing the standard for entry” to the United States.
Immigration has been overshadowed by surging coronavirus case numbers and an economy shattered by a nearly yearlong pandemic, but it was central to Trump’s rise to power in the Republican Party, and Miller has been a driving force for the administration’s often controversial policies to crack down on illegal migration and erect hurdles for aspiring legal immigrants.
“A major priority is going to be really cracking down aggressively on sanctuary cities,” Miller said. He noted that the administration has withheld some grants to sanctuary cities. In a second term, he said, it would continue the battle with two new initiatives.
First, Miller said, Trump would push for legislation filed by Sen. Thom Tillis, which would punish jurisdictions that refuse to turn over arrested people who are in the US illegally to ICE for deportation. Second, Trump would go a step further with a law to “outlaw the practice,” thereby making it mandatory for authorities to turn those migrants over to the feds.
And here’s the quick sum-up from Jennifer Jacobs.
Trump’s immigration agenda, if re-elected, is to limit asylum grants, punish and outlaw sanctuary cities, expand the travel ban with tougher screening for visa applicants, and put new limits on work visas, @sahilkapur reports after interviewing Trump adviser Stephen Miller. https://t.co/BpXjMcDHlH
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) October 30, 2020
Read it in full here: NBC News – Trump adviser Stephen Miller reveals aggressive second-term immigration agenda
If, like me, you are addicted to reading hypothetical “What if…?” scenarios about Election Day counting chaos, then good news, because Bloomberg have a fine one this morning. Mark Niquette lays out how if the election goes into overtime, provisional ballots become the focus.
If the US is still waiting to learn who the president will be days or even weeks after Tuesday’s election, provisional ballots are likely to be at the center of any disputes.
They are the ballots cast by voters whose eligibility is questioned for some reason. Those ballots are set aside and held for a period of days after the election while workers determine whether they should be counted.
Experts say the number of provisional ballots this year may set a record, exceeding the 2.7 million cast in 2012 and almost 2.5 million cast in 2016, in part because some voters who requested ballots by mail are showing up at polls to vote in person. That could lead to late results in key battleground states.
In 2016, Trump carried Arizona by 91,234 votes, and there were 102,510 provisional ballots, according to the US Election Assistance Commission. Pennsylvania had 26,451 provisionals, and that was before the commonwealth expanded voting by mail last year. Trump carried the state by 44,292 votes last time out.
In most states, voters who received a mail-in ballot but show up at a poll instead will cast a provisional ballot unless a jurisdiction uses an electronic poll book or allows voters to bring their mail-in ballot to be canceled so they can cast a regular ballot.
Read more here: Bloomberg – If election goes into overtime, provisional ballots become focus
Here’s something else for your ears. With less than a week to go to the election, Jonathan Freedland is joined by the national affairs correspondent for Guardian US Tom McCarthy (who was hosting this blog earlier).
They look at the many variables influencing the US presidential election, including the polls, the headlines, early voter turnout and voter registration trends.
As a laid off coal mine electrician, Nolan Triplett doesn’t think his industry will ever return to the heady days when it powered America and offered generations of Appalachians a chance at a middle class life.
But he still backs the president who said he’d reopen the mines and put thousands back to work, even if such promises proved empty.
“Even if I don’t go back to this industry, I’m still with him,” said Triplett, 41, outside a mine worker certification office in Danville, a town of about 700 people along the Little Coal River in Boone County south of Charleston.
Four years after Donald Trump donned a miner’s helmet at a West Virginia campaign rally and vowed to save a dying industry, coal has not come roaring back. The fuel has been outmatched against cheaper, cleaner natural gas and renewable energy.
But many West Virginians applaud Trump’s efforts and remain loyal as he seeks a second term. Speaking to Cuneyt Dil of the Associated Press, Triplett and other voters say they are attracted to his “America First” slogan and anti-abortion stance, and figure he’s the only one standing in the way of the entire industry closing down.
“He’s done good for this country all around,” said Triplett, who lost his last mine job when the pandemic hit.
Democrat Joe Biden has promised to steer investments to create new jobs in renewable energy, but many in coal country seem more intent on blaming the climate-change messenger than considering his plans for growth.
Next to Triplett stood Ronnie Starr, who lives near the Kentucky border in Mingo County. He’s had to move as far as Alabama to find work as a mine electrician since he started in the early 2000s, and is also out of a job now. He said the last Democrat he voted for was Bill Clinton, and he enthusiastically supports Trump.
“You got the right president, things go good,” said Starr, 43.
“And you got one group that hates us with a passion and would rather see us starve out and die,” Triplett cut in, “then you get another group that supports us, so it’s a rollercoaster.”
But as Sen. Joe Manchin, a rare Democrat still thriving in West Virginia says “The markets have shifted. The coal jobs did not come back as the president promised.”
Anthony Starkey, a retired miner in Danville, said Trump earned his vote again by signing a bill last year to save the pensions of some retired coal workers, including his own.
“He’s a typical New Yorker, he’s arrogant,” Starkey said, pausing while mowing the lawn outside the Independent Order of Odd Fellows lodge in Madison, the Boone County seat. “Whether you love him or hate him, he’s done what he’s said he’s going to do.”
Our US elections poll tracker is keeping an eye on the rolling 14 day averages of the polls in eight key states that will be vital in the race for the White House.
It currently has Biden ahead in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin and Iowa. Trump retains a lead in Ohio. But, a big note of caution here – at lot of those Biden leads are well within the polling margins of error.
You can check them here: US election polls tracker: who is leading in swing states, Trump or Biden?
It does seem incredible that this close to Election Day there are states where people are still bickering over how to conduct the election, but here we all are. Simon Lewis reports for Reuters on the latest shenanigans in battleground Pennsylvania.
Officials have urged local election offices to actually begin counting mail-in ballots on Election Day, after several Republican-led counties in the battleground state said they would not start tabulating the votes until a day later.
Trump said this week that an extended period of counting mail-in ballots would be “totally inappropriate” and an overall winner should be declared on Tuesday night after polls close. There’s no basis in law for that assertion by the president.
At least three Republican-run counties in Pennsylvania have said they will not begin counting votes until next Wednesday, in part because of staffing constraints. Talks between the state’s Democrats and Republicans to allow more time to handle the sharp increase in mail-in balloting this year were unsuccessful.
The US supreme court ruled on Wednesday that Pennsylvania could count mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and received up to three days later, rejecting a Republican effort to have late ballots thrown out.
Here’s our quick video wrap on the impact of Hurricane Zeta, which has wreaked havoc across southern states of the US, killing at least six people and leaving 2.6 million without power. Zeta brought damaging winds of 100mph across states including Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, while flooding also occurred.
Kari Paul has this on all the steps social media companies have made to combat misinformation ahead of the election.
Four years ago, foreign actors leveraged social media to interfere in the US presidential election. This year, too, misinformation is among the greatest threats to American democracy, experts warn.
With conspiracy theories such as QAnon flourishing, a president who regularly uses social media platforms to demonize his opponents or spread falsehoods about the election process, and a federal government that has done little to combat foreign election interference online, tech platforms’ responsibility in the 2020 election process has only grown.
Reeling from criticism they have in past years failed to act decisively to curb those threats, major tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have announced broad steps to combat misinformation ahead of the 3 November vote.
The measures range from changing algorithmic recommendations to limiting users’ abilities to share falsehoods. But some experts are doubtful the changes, enacted as hundreds of thousands of Americans have already cast votes, are sufficient. Others have criticized the lack of transparency into how these changes are applied.
Read more here: Here are all the steps social media made to combat misinformation. Will it be enough?
There’s been quite a bit of attention to this story from NBC News: How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge. Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny report:
One month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, a fake “intelligence” document about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving Joe Biden’s son and business in China.
The document, a 64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of Trump, appears to be the work of a fake “intelligence firm” called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents.
The author of the document, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspen, is a fabricated identity, according to analysis by disinformation researchers, who also concluded that Aspen’s profile picture was created with an artificial intelligence face generator. The intelligence firm that Aspen lists as his previous employer said that no one by that name had ever worked for the company and that no one by that name lives in Switzerland, according to public records and social media searches.
One of the original posters of the document, a blogger and professor named Christopher Balding, took credit for writing parts of it when asked about it and said Aspen does not exist.
Despite the document’s questionable authorship and anonymous sourcing, its claims that Hunter Biden has a problematic connection to the Communist Party of China have been used by people who oppose the Chinese government, as well as by far-right influencers, to baselessly accuse candidate Joe Biden of being beholden to the Chinese government.
Read more here: NBC News – How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge
The death toll from Zeta has reached six. The first confirmed death was a 55-year-old man in New Orleans, who was electrocuted by a downed power line, the Louisiana Department of Health told Reuters.
This was followed by four deaths in Alabama and Georgia from trees crashing down on homes, according to Gwinnett County fire officials. A 58-year-old man in Mississippi drowned when he was trapped in rising seawater after taking video of the storm.
Zeta was the fifth named storm to strike Louisiana this year and the 27th named storm this season, one less than the record set in 2005. It set a new record as the 11th named storm to make landfall in the continental US in a single season, well beyond the nine that hit in 1916.
At the height of the outages, as many as 2.6 million people were without power across seven states from Louisiana to Virginia. Utility crews were out assessing the damage and fixing it.
In Louisiana, one of the hardest hit areas was Grand Isle, a barrier island community south of New Orleans. Gov. John Bel Edwards called the damage there “catastrophic” and ordered the Louisiana National Guard to fly in soldiers to assist with search and rescue efforts.
And as bad as the 2020 hurricane season has been, it isn’t over. Forecasters said disturbed air off the northern coast of South America could become a tropical depression and head toward Nicaragua by early next week a forecast not lost on Louisiana’s governor.
“Let’s not pray it on anybody else,” Edwards said. “Let’s just pray it away from us.”
With just a few days until the 3 November election, there were concerns about whether the storm would impact voters’ ability to get to the polls.
Far fewer early voters showed up after the storm in Pascagoula, Mississippi, a court clerk told the Associated Press, and power failures in two Georgia counties disrupted voting. In Louisiana, getting power back to polling centers was a priority as was letting voters know quickly if there were any changes to locations come Tuesday.
In Georgia, a group of civil rights organizations asked the governor to extend early voting hours Friday.
The latest episode of our award-winning podcast Today In Focus is today looking at Donald Trump and the rise of white supremacist extremism.
As American’s go to the polls next week they must assess the record of a president who has professed to be the “least racist person”. His own Department of Homeland Security describes white supremacists as posing the most persistent and lethal terror threat in the country.
In May 2017, Demetria Hester was on her way home from work on a train in Portland, Oregon when Jeremy Christian, an avowed white supremacist, boarded and began shouting racist abuse. She says she told him to shut up. When they had got off the train, he threw a bottle that struck her in the face. The next day he killed two men and grievously injured a third. Demetria describes to Anushka Asthana how she felt the police responded to the incident that night and how she watched her attacker walk away without being questioned.
Earlier this year, a court in Portland found Jeremy Christian guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of first-degree attempted murder and sentenced to life without parole. But as the Guardian’s Lois Beckett tells Anushka, this is the extreme end of an ideology that has permeated all parts of US society, and that President Trump has repeatedly refused to condemn.
Opinion polls suggest that Trump could be a dead man walking, hurtling towards a psychologically crushing defeat like one-term president Jimmy Carter against Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Yet on the trail he continues to project the image of a happy warrior cruising to re-election, regaling big crowds with selective poll numbers, bogus conspiracy theories and his own brand of humor. And his base remains loyal to the end with cheers, merriment and chants of “Four more years!”, “Lock him up!” and “Build that wall!”
If Trump does lose next week – and the polls have been wrong before so that remains a big “if” – he will go down with all guns blazing.
Trump has always been in his element campaigning rather than governing. He continued to hold rallies even after winning the 2016 election, throwing out populist red meat and feeding off the energy of fervent crowds. Whereas Washington is difficult and messy, these public events offer simple affirmation. Free from the constraints of the White House, its protocols and its officials, he uses the rallies to indulge in free association riffs and play to the gallery.
Now they may represent his last best hope of clinging to the presidency. Rival Joe Biden is running a more low-key, in-person campaign with smaller and less frequent events, but has raised vastly more money than Trump and is outspending him in TV advertising.
The president evidently revels in the romantic self-image of an old-fashioned insurgent barnstorming small towns, standing on a soapbox, spinning a yarn and winning over all comers. The power of live performance appeared to work in 2016 in states such as Wisconsin, where Hillary Clinton did not show up and Trump won narrowly.
Charlie Gerow, a Republican strategist in Pennsylvania, told the Washington Post: “The rallies are not the be-all, end-all by any stretch. But they are an important show of strength to rally the base and increase the intensity of those people.”
“Folks who attend a rally go home, talk to friends, talk to neighbors, talk to their family about what happened … Trump has thousands of little ambassadors going to their little corners of America, and the Biden campaign doesn’t have that.”
Read more of David Smith’s piece here: ‘He’s a salesman’: why rallies are Trump’s last best hope of clinging to presidency
It’s not just the Trump-vs-Biden clash at the top of the ticket that will shape the next couple of years in American politics. There’s a possibility that the Democrats might entrench their position in the House of Representatives and flip the Senate. CNN has this take on the Senate and House races the have become more competitive for Democrats in final sprint to Election Day.
Democrats aren’t just playing in red states and districts; they’re seriously competitive in many of them. Inside Elections now projects Democrats to pick up a net gain of 14 to 20 seats in the House, building on their historic 2018 midterm gains to grow their House majority, and a net gain of four to six seats in the Senate, which would be enough to flip the chamber.
Inside Elections has shifted three Senate races in Democrats’ favor: Alaska and the two Georgia races. Both are red states that Trump carried in 2016. But in Georgia particularly, Trump is struggling to match his margin from four years ago, with some public polls showing him trailing Biden, who visited the Peach State this week.
The question in many traditionally red districts this year, with Trump on the ballot, was whether voters would take their anger out on Trump, and only Trump, continuing to vote Republican down the rest of the ticket.
But given how closely most down-ballot Republicans have stood with Trump over the past four years and how nationalized House races have become, more of them are now at risk of going down with the President.
Read more here: CNN – These Senate and House races have become more competitive for Democrats in final sprint to Election Day
The president may have finally gone to bed. Donald Trump hasn’t tweeted since around 3am. Here were his last couple of messages for the American people.
Biden will destroy the United States Supreme Court. Don’t let this happen!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2020
If Sleepy Joe Biden is actually elected President, the 4 Justices (plus1) that helped make such a ridiculous win possible would be relegated to sitting on not only a heavily PACKED COURT, but probably a REVOLVING COURT as well. At least the many new Justices will be Radical Left!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2020
This seemed to sum up quite a wide response to Trump’s late night flurry of tweets.
MAKE AMERICA SLEEP AGAIN !!!! pic.twitter.com/jnBb54hdJN
— porochista khakpour (@PKhakpour) October 30, 2020
Donald Trump has waved the white flag, abandoned our families, and surrendered to this virus.
That was Joe Biden’s message yesterday. He slammed the president’s campaign rallies, saying they are spreading more than just Covid-19 – they are dividing the nation politically. “Donald Trump just had a super-spreader event here again,” Biden told supporters in Tampa, Florida. “They’re spreading more than just coronavirus. He’s spreading division and discord.”
Another word on those Covid figures. The numbers don’t quite tally because we have been using the Johns Hopkins university figures, and the New York Times have been compiling their own, but this is a pretty stark graph of the current coronavirus trajectory in the US.
• A record 90,446 new U.S. coronavirus cases in 1 day
— Mike Baker (@ByMikeBaker) October 30, 2020
• That's more than 1 new case for every second of the day
• 24 states set new 7-day records
• 544,775 new cases in past week
• That's 1 out of every 600 Americans testing positive in a single weekhttps://t.co/74QzWYbn1p pic.twitter.com/Le4f73ZmTi
If you look at where cases are increasing, you can see that Montana, Wyoming and Alaska have the steepest upwards curve, with cases increasing at a rate of over 20%. Louisiana is the only state in the whole of the US showing an increase rate of lower than 3%.
Key events so far…
- The president has been on a late night tweeting spree, threatening that Joe Biden will destroy the supreme court and using the hashtag #BidenCrimeFamily
- On Fox News, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, claimed that the number of deaths from Covid-19 is “almost nothing”. Yesterday alone, according to figures from the Johns Hopkins University tracker, the US recorded 971 deaths, and its highest ever level of new daily cases at 88,521.
- Yesterday the White House coronavirus taskforce warned of an ‘unrelenting’ spread of the disease.
- GDP figures yesterday showed the economy bouncing back from the cliff it fell off due to coronavirus shutdowns. But the recovery is not happening for everyone.
- The Trump administration sent out a press release boasting that ‘this jump in GDP is nearly double the previous record set 70 years ago’. The press release did not mention the huge drop in GDP that had been seen in Q2 – but did find a way to have a dig at former president Barack Obama.
- Joe Biden has pledged that if he wins the election, he’ll put together a taskforce to reunite the 545 immigrant children who’ve been separated from their families by the Trump administration.
- Americans have bought a record 17m guns this year.
- President Trump is making campaign stops in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota today. Joe Biden is also traveling to Wisconsin and Minnesota, and he’ll drop in on Iowa too.
- We’ve got a post-election live event to discuss the results. Jonathan Freedland, Kenya Evelyn, David Smith and Sarah Churchwell will be taking part, and you can join in too. It is on Wednesday 4 November, starting at 2pm in New York, 7pm in London. You can find out more details and book tickets here.
I’m Martin Belam, taking over for Tom McCarthy. You can get in touch with me at martin.belam@theguardian.com. I had some lovely messages yesterday from Tucker Carlson fans.
The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino and Maanvi Singh report: will Arizona’s suburbs abandon the party of Trump?
In the agonizing days after the 2018 election, Christine Marsh, a Democratic candidate for state Senate in a traditionally Republican suburban Phoenix district, watched her opponent’s lead dwindle to a few hundred votes, with thousands of ballots left to be counted.
In the end, just 267 votes separated them.
Marsh lost. But the result was ominous for Republicans, in a corner of Phoenix’s ever-expanding suburbs where Barry Goldwater, the long-serving Arizona senator and conservative icon, launched his presidential campaign in 1964 from the patio of his famed hilltop estate in Paradise Valley.
In the decades since, population growth and shifting demographics have transformed the cultural, political and economic complexion of the region.
And the election of Donald Trump has exacerbated these trends across the country, perhaps nowhere more dramatically than in diverse, fast-growing metropolitan areas like Phoenix, where the coalition of affluent, white suburban voters that once cemented Republican dominance is unraveling.
“We’ve seen a huge shift in my district, even in just the last two years,” said Marsh, a a high school English teacher who is challenging Republican incumbent Kate Brophy McGee again this year. The district, which includes the prosperous Paradise Valley and parts of north central Phoenix, is now at the center of the political battle for Arizona’s suburbs.
Over the last four years, Republicans have watched their support collapse in suburbs across the country, as the president’s divisive rhetoric and incendiary behavior alienates women, college graduates and independent voters. But as Trump continues to downplay the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic, even after more than 225,000 deaths nationwide and as cases continue to climb, his conduct is imperiling not only his own re-election campaign, but his entire party.
Read the full piece:
Updated
Fingers crossed, and crossed again:
America votes: Inside the 30 October edition of @guardianweekly. With the US election nearly upon us, can Joe Biden translate his poll lead into victory and end the Trump era? https://t.co/J1M6pIBJwf pic.twitter.com/6pnYy9H81w
— The Guardian (@guardian) October 30, 2020
tfw you are a Republican incumbent president definitely winning an election
Way ahead in Texas!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2020
(Trump of course can still win the election and the unique circumstances of mail-in voting, the coronavirus pandemic, court curveballs and even militant activity, added to the president’s false accusations of fraud and eager sowing of chaos, have imbued the 2020 election with added uncertainty.)
For all the focus on the presidential race and the senate races, the election contests that have the most immediate impact on many people’s lives are down-ballot, at the state and local level.
Some of the most important races are to elect local sheriffs, prosecutors, and judges, who define the on-the-ground reality of the criminal justice system from Minneapolis to Ferguson to Philadelphia to Phoenix.
These elected officials collectively draw the line between innocence and guilt and decide who to charge, what to charge, and how to punish. They assert control in the street, shaping the ability of activists to demonstrate. They determine the culture of law enforcement and they are responsible for equality before the law.
In a boon to voters, The Appeal website and their political report editor Daniel Nichanian are tracking these races across the country and building tools to help people zero in on the most important local elections and ballot initiatives.
Check it out:
Incredible interactive guide from the always brilliant @Taniel on the many key criminal justice elections around the country we are tracking this cycle - sheriff's, prosecutors, judges, governors, mayors, ballot measures and more https://t.co/gl60p7gsFL
— Matt Ferner (@matthewferner) October 29, 2020
Colorado voters are taking up a wolf reintroduction initiative that would fill in a crucial missing piece of the iconic animal’s historic territorial range, the Associated Press reports. Gray wolves have rebounded in parts of the American West with remarkable speed following their reintroduction 25 years ago, now numbering more than 2,000 animals in 300+ packs. Here’s AP:
the 2020 election offers an opportunity to jumpstart the wolf’s expansion southward into the heart of the Rocky Mountains. A Colorado ballot initiative would reintroduce wolves on the state’s Western Slope. It comes after the Trump administration on Thursday lifted protections for wolves across most of the U.S., including Colorado, putting their future in the hands of state wildlife agencies.
The Colorado effort, if successful, could fill a significant gap in the species’ historical range, creating a bridge between the Northern Rockies gray wolves and a small Mexican gray wolf population in Arizona and New Mexico.
“Colorado is the mother lode, the final piece,” said Mike Phillips, who led the Yellowstone reintroduction project and now serves in the Montana Senate.
Here is Susan Collins, the endangered Republican senator from Maine, finding three different ways not to answer the Donald Trump question. Her tacit campaign pitch is that Republicans need to hold the senate to check a Joe Biden presidency. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell probably gave Collins a green light to vote against Amy Coney Barrett – he did not need her vote, and a majority of Mainers told pollsters they objected to Barrett’s hasty installation.
Senator Collins was asked *three times* last night if she supports Donald Trump's reelection, and she refused to answer each time.
— Sara Gideon (@SaraGideon) October 30, 2020
The election is 5 days away, and Mainers deserve answers. #mepolitics pic.twitter.com/xrhxhTmEl5
Tons of people continue to vote early in Houston, the crown jewel of Texas. (?)
NEW: We just hit our highest voter turnout. Ever. Nearly 1.4 million votes have been cast in Harris County and we’re not even done with Early Vote yet. Let’s run up the score, Texas!
— Lina Hidalgo (@LinaHidalgoTX) October 30, 2020
What does it mean? Take it from the Cook Political Report’s congressional races expert:
Periodic PSA: if someone tells you who's on track win certain states based on modeled party ID of the early vote, they're full of crap.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) October 30, 2020
Many states provide information about how many ballots Republican and Democratic voters have requested and returned. But because we don’t know how many people crossed party lines to vote for the other side, and because we don’t know how many people will vote on election day, that information is not very informative. The exception is in Nevada where almost everyone votes early and where the journalist Jon Ralston keeps a crystal ball (“Trump still down in all reasonable models,” Ralston says in his blog.)
But a record number of voters are participating in the 2020 election in places like Houston. Many no doubt are motivated to vote early by a desire to avoid packed polling places on election day. Others might be motivated by the candidates. The total vote for the two major party candidates is expected to eclipse the ~130m tally from 2016 and perhaps climb toward 150m.
Senator Mike Lee of Utah has given rise to some consternation within the Mormon community for comparing Donald Trump to a hero from the Book of Mormon at a politics rally in Arizona.
“He seeks not power but to pull it down,” Lee said, paraphrasing Mormon scripture, as Trump stood nearby at a lectern smiling – thinking to himself, perhaps, “Yes, that sounds exactly like me”.
“He seeks not the praise of the world or the fake news,” Lee continued. “He seeks the well-being and the peace of the American people.”
Lee went on praise Trump’s fidelity as a husband and to say that Trump’s fraudulent charity scam was a rare and uncharacteristic lapse in the president’s lifelong commitment to succoring the poor and also Trump hates money. (Kidding he did not say that.)
Senator Mike Lee campaigning in Arizona, hard selling Trump to religious groups from Evangelical to Mormons. Comparing Trump to Captain Moroni from the Book Of Mormon. Saying @potus does not seek the praise of the world. pic.twitter.com/BV4v8O5bYs
— Heidi Hatch (@tvheidihatch) October 29, 2020
The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins has noted criticism of the remarks and tweeted part of a statement from Lee in which the senator says he respects people’s right to think what he said was not good.
Mike Lee on Trump/Moroni: Some "found that comparison upsetting, blasphemous, and otherwise wrong. I respect their right to feel that way, and realize that my impromptu comments may not have been the best forum for drawing a novel analogy from scripture"https://t.co/kSgGqaXUQS
— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) October 30, 2020
Hello and welcome to our round-the-clock coverage of the 2020 US elections. More than 80m Americans have already cast their ballots, according to the US Elections Project. Election day is on Tuesday.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden are scheduled to hold dueling events in Minnesota and Wisconsin today, with Biden also traveling to Iowa. Both candidates were in Florida on Thursday, where a Biden event appeared to be cut short by a downpour, while 17 attendees at a Trump rally had to be taken to the hospital for intense heat, according to NBC News.
A federal appeals court ordered that ballots arriving after 3 November in Minnesota be segregated – in case they are invalidated in a final ruling. One of the state’s Democratic senators, Amy Klobuchar, decried the late-stage order and urged people not to drop anything in the mail.
On Fox News, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, claimed that the number of deaths from Covid-19 is “almost nothing”. At least 1,049 new Covid-19 deaths were reported on Thursday, according to the Covid Tracking Project, and the number of confirmed deaths from Covid-19 in the United States is roughly 230,000.
Thank you for joining us today!
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