This was published 1 year ago
That’s all we have for you today on our US election blog but please join us again tomorrow morning as we continue to follow the developments as we count down to election day on Wednesday AEDT.
Here are a couple of the major developments from today which you can find in the blog:
*Trump performs bizarre act on microphone, threatens to ‘knock out’ sound aides
*Harris makes surprise showing on SNL as shock poll result buoys her campaign
Donald Trump’s final rally for the day in Greensboro, North Carolina, wound through an eclectic mix of tangents, The Washington Post reports.
He started off sounding nostalgic about his time on the campaign trail now that it’s coming to an end.
“This will never happen again,” he told the crowd multiple times. “I have three big ones tomorrow and then I have four big ones on Monday and then we shut it down. Never to happen again. Which is sad, but here’s the good part, hopefully we will have achieved our goal.”
The former president suggested he could win New Jersey, a blue-leaning state that analysts do not consider competitive: “A little birdie told me we’re leading in New Jersey, what’s that all about?” Trump asked.
Touting his support for IVF, he called himself “the father of fertilisation.” He asserted without proof that his opponent, Kamala Harris, lied about working at McDonald’s, mocking how “she laboured over the french fry stove.”
It is not just cameo television appearances the Harris camp has been embracing on over the final weekend of the race. The Washington Post reports that her campaign has also been aggressively working on getting out the vote in crucial swing states. On Saturday (US time), according to an adviser, the campaign workers and volunteers:
All three states are crucial in this week’s election.
Kamala Harris has appeared alongside actress Maya Rudolph, who plays Harris during political sketches, on Saturday Night Live and its famous cold opening.
Harris received a long ovation from the SNL audience.
Their sketch ends with Rudolph, arm in arm with Harris, saying “I’m going to vote for us” and Harris asks if she was registered in Pennsylvania.
Rudolph said “nope”, Harris said “It was worth a shot” and they started the show with the famous “live from New York, it’s Saturday night”.
Kamala Harris’ team is making an expensive play to push its closing argument: a two-minute ad, dubbed “Brighter Future,” that will air during Sunday afternoon National Football League games on CBS and Fox, including the game between the Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions.
The last-minute appeal will be broadcast to millions of NFL viewers and reach a large audience of voters in swing states Wisconsin and Michigan.
The Packers v Lions game starts in the late afternoon in the eastern states and features two teams who draw a large audience from within their own states and from expats around the country.
The NFL draws millions of viewers around America on Sundays with CBS and Fox available right around the country.
A Georgia judge on Saturday rejected a Republican lawsuit trying to block counties from opening election offices on Saturday and Sunday to let voters hand in their mail ballots in person.
The lawsuit only named Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold that includes most of the city of Atlanta and is home to 11 per cent of the state’s voters. But other populous counties that tend to vote for Democrats also announced election offices would open over the weekend to allow hand return of absentee ballots.
Fulton County spokeswoman Jessica Corbitt-Dominguez said 105 ballots were received on Saturday at the four locations in that county.
The Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and the Georgia Republican Party said in a statement that they sent letters to six counties demanding that all ballots received after Friday be kept separate from other ballots, saying they intend to sue over the issue. The letters were sent to Chatham, Athens-Clarke, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties.
Never before in US history have voters chosen between two presidential candidates who so starkly personify America’s chronic divides. Not even in the 1860 election, on the eve of the Civil War, when the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln emerged the victor from a four-way contest which featured two rival Democrats.
In this epochal election, a black woman who is the daughter of immigrants is up against a racist misogynist who rose to political prominence as the untitled leader of the birther movement, which denied the very legitimacy of America’s first president of colour, and launched his first presidential campaign with an attack on Mexican immigrants.
Kamala Harris is not just a Democrat but a democrat: a believer in free and fair elections and the sanctity of their outcomes. Donald Trump has repeatedly defamed democracy, both in 2020 when he lost and even in 2016 when he won. Refusing to countenance that Hillary Clinton had amassed 3 million more votes nationwide – which was irrelevant to the result, of course, because of the vagaries of the Electoral College – Trump speciously claimed that up to 5 million of those ballots had been cast illegally.
The former president is a demagogue, while his 60-year-old opponent is decorous and demure. Harris is a former attorney who believes in the majesty of constitutional law, whereas Trump, a wannabe dictator, once threatened to terminate the country’s rule book.
Live from New York, it’s a presidential candidate scrounging for every vote in the final days before the election.
Vice President Kamala Harris made a surprise trip to New York City on Saturday to appear on Saturday Night Live, briefly stepping away from the battleground states where she’s been furiously campaigning in favour of the iconic sketch comedy show.
Harris departed on Air Force Two after an early evening campaign stop on in Charlotte, North Carolina. She was scheduled to head to Detroit, but once in the air, aides said she’d be making an unscheduled stop and the plane landed at LaGuardia Airport in Queens.
Harris arrived at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, where SNL is recorded, shortly after 8pm, enough time for a quick rehearsal before the show airs live at 11.30pm. It is the final SNL episode before election day on Tuesday.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a prominent proponent of debunked public health claims whom Donald Trump has promised to put in charge of health initiatives, said on Saturday that Trump would push to remove fluoride from drinking water on his first day in office.
Fluoride strengthens teeth and reduces cavities by replacing minerals lost during normal wear and tear, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The addition of low levels of fluoride to drinking water has long been considered one of the greatest public health achievements of the last century.
Kennedy made the declaration on the social media platform X alongside a variety of claims about the health effects of fluoride.
“On January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water,” Kennedy wrote. Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, “want to make America healthy again”, he added, repeating a phrase Trump often uses and links to Kennedy.
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has surpassed Republican Donald Trump in a new poll in Iowa, with likely women voters responsible for the turnaround in a state that Trump easily won in 2016 and 2020, according to The Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll released on Saturday.
The poll of 808 likely voters, who were surveyed October 28-31, has Harris leading Trump 47 per cent to 44 per cent in Iowa, which has been trending deeply Republican in recent years.
It is within the 3.4 percentage point margin of error, but it marked a turnaround from a September Iowa poll that had Trump with a four-point lead, the newspaper reported.
“The poll shows that women – particularly those who are older or who are politically independent – are driving the late shift toward Harris,” the Register said.