3 weeks ago

US presidential election updates: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump swing through Wisconsin

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump held duelling rallies within miles of each other in swing state Wisconsin’s largest city, Milwaukee, on Friday night. Milwaukee is home to the most Democratic votes in Wisconsin, but its conservative Republican suburbs are a critical area for Trump as he tries to reclaim the state he narrowly won in 2016 but lost in 2020.

Earlier, Trump continued to attack Liz Cheney at a rally in Warren, Michigan, where he also lamented the state of his hair. “It looks not so good today … not a good hair day for me, ay ay ay.” After his campaign rhetoric earlier tipped over from hateful to violent – when he suggested Cheney should be shot at with “nine barrels” and the guns “trained on her face” – the attorney general’s office in Arizona, where Trump made the remark, opened a “death threat investigation”.

In Pennsylvania, a neck-and-neck race is hurtling toward the finish line of the 2024 election with no clear frontrunner. The victor of Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes, the most of any battleground state, will probably win the electoral college and determine the trajectory of the country for the next four years.

Here’s what else happened on Friday:

Kamala Harris election news and updates

Harris told her crowd at the Wisconsin State Fair Park Exposition Center that with four days to go, there was still work to do, but “we like hard work”. Minutes beforehand, during a raucous warmup, the rapper Cardi B referred to Trump as “Donnie Dunk” and told the crowd: “Trump says he’s going to protect women whether they like it or not. Well, if his definition of protection is not the freedom of choice, if his definition of protection is making sure our daughters have fewer rights than our mothers, then I don’t want it! I don’t want it! I don’t want it!”
Earlier, Harris said Trump’s violent rhetoric about Cheney “must be disqualifying” as far as his suitability for the presidency is concerned. “Representative Cheney is a true patriot who has shown extraordinary courage in putting country above party.” Cheney for her part warned the public against dictatorship and a presidential candidate who “wants to be a tyrant”.
Republicans’ latest offensive and misogynistic comments have boosted Democratic hopes of turning out women on election day in a contest where the rights of women have been a central issue for the Harris campaign.

Donald Trump election news and updates

At his Milwaukee rally on Friday, Trump called Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5-hour-long meandering speech that touched on the economy and foreign policy but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style. “I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump, promising to usher in a new “golden age”. “Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929-style depression.”
Trump’s supporters are laying the ground for rejecting the result of the election if he loses, according to warnings from Democrats as well as anti-Maga Republicans. As well as baseless and/or failed lawsuits, suspicions have been voiced over partisan polls run by groups with Republican links in battleground states that mainly show Trump leading – the idea being that if Trump loses, the polls can be proferred as “evidence” that he was cheated out of the win.
The New York author and journalist Michael Wolff has released audio tapes that appear to detail how Trump had a close social relationship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that he has long denied. Wolff says the recordings were made during a 2017 discussion with Epstein about writing his biography. Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges two years later. Trump’s campaign said the claims, made on Wolff’s podcast Fire and Fury, amounted to “outlandish false smears”.

Elsewhere on the campaign trail

A federal judge rejected an attempt by Elon Musk’s America Pac to have charges of running an illegal lottery heard in federal court, instead of the courts of Pennsylvania, where Musk is running the sweepstakes to help Trump get re-elected. The case has been sent back to the Pennsylvania state court for a further hearing on Monday.
Racism and misogyny; a firing squad death threat to a former congresswoman; the Republican candidate for president dressing up as a sanitation worker in the cab of a garbage truck. Donald Trump’s final full week on the campaign trail was as unedifying as it was bizarre – Richard Luscombe sums it up.
A valuable Republican voting bloc in Arizona is seeing a shift of its members towards Harris in numbers that Democrats believe could make the difference for them in an election where the latest polls have Trump slightly ahead. That bloc is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – the Mormons.