Although polling averages gave Clinton the edge over Trump in 2016 there are significant differences in the evidence today
For months, activists and Democratic party officials have been telling Joe Biden supporters that the only answer to the question “can we trust the polls?” is to go out and vote for Biden, and then get others to do the same.
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Election officials in US battleground states are still fighting to limit the usage of ballot drop boxes, with only days left until 3 November.
Related: 'To me, it's voter suppression': the Republican fight to limit ballot boxes
Joe Biden will campaign in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin tomorrow.
Both candidates have been making the rounds to swing states in a final push ahead of election day. In Florida today, where polls have found Biden neck-and-neck with Trump, the former vice-president appealed to Latinos – a key demographic that could help deliver victories to Democrats.
Continue reading...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 head 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
Several polls of battleground states were just released, so the blog is going to sum them up.
First up is Georgia, where Biden has pulled slightly ahead of Trump, according to Monmouth University.
GEORGIA VOTER POLL: President - @JoeBiden overtakes @realDonaldTrump
Registered voters:
45% Trump (47% in Sept.)
50% Biden (46%)
Likely voters, high turnout:
46% Trump (48%)
50% Biden (46%)
Likely voters, low turnout:
48% Trump (50%)
50% Biden (45%) https://t.co/aUyYrRGfMt pic.twitter.com/pygB8gmNML
Trump predicted he would “over-perform” on election day, as polls show him trailing nationally and in key battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
At a press event in Las Vegas, Trump says: “On Tuesday, we’re going to over-perform” #Elections2020 pic.twitter.com/UGf7ZHRbuJ
Continue reading...If he succeeds in defeating Trump, the Democrat will have to urgently tackle the pandemic and rebuild global relationships
If Joe Biden wins the 2020 US election against Donald Trump next week, the new president-elect will face enormous pressures to implement a laundry list of priorities on a range of issues from foreign policy to the climate crisis, reversing many of the stark changes implemented by his predecessor.
Related: From climate to China, how Joe Biden is plotting America’s restoration
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Donald Trump Jr has just retweeted Derek Hunter saying that “Leftists really seem to want dead police officers” in connection to the shooting of Walter Wallace Jr in Philadelphia.
Police shot and killed a guy coming at them with a knife who was given ample opportunity to drop it and didn't. Leftists really seem to want dead police officers. https://t.co/askRXGpEzs
Related: Philadelphia protesters take to streets after police killing of black man
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany once praised Joe Biden as “a man of the people” capable of “coming off as human” and “resonating with middle class voters”.
In an interview with a New York radio station in 2015, she also said that though she thought Donald Trump would be more likely to beat Biden, then considering a run for president, than Hillary Clinton, “I think the juxtaposition of kind of the man of the people and kind of this tycoon, is a problem.”
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Here again is a link to the interview with Donald Trump published on Sunday by 60 Minutes, an institution in US television news known for editorial balance and seriousness of purpose. Significantly, the program also reaches millions of older voters, who overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2016 but who appear to be splitting their vote this year between the candidates.
In this clip, via Vox’s Aaron Rupar, Trump whines about the difficulty level of the questions he is being confronted with, after interviewer Lesley Stahl refuses to endorse one of his conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation.
I don’t understand how anyone can watch this and draw any conclusion other than Trump is completely unfit for his job pic.twitter.com/DA87zGehXI
Hello and welcome to our round-the-clock coverage as the 2020 US election enters its final lap. Only eight days to go.
On Sunday, the number of early voters in the election surpassed 58m, the number who voted early in 2016. That means the 2020 election will mark the first time in history that more than half of the overall US vote was cast early.
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Voting has begun...
As McConnell continues his cynical, revisionist version of how we’ve ended up at this moment – awaiting the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett – the supreme court, one member short, is still working.
Just now, the court upheld a federal appeals court ruling that blocks a deadline extension for mail-in-ballots, awarding a victory for Republicans in a crusade against expanding voting rights and access.
Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York state, is having a field day over the comments of the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows this morning. In a rare moment of transparency, Meadows admitted to a Sunday political talk show that the Trump administration had no intention of containing coronavirus, saying: “We’re not going to control the pandemic”.
Cuomo said that thinking was tantamount to giving in to the virus. “They surrendered without firing a shot. It was the great American surrender,” he said on Sunday, as reported by the Daily News.
After the Senate voted to move forward with the final vote to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Mitch McConnell spoke on the Senate floor, celebrating the lasting influence of the vote for posterity.
“By tomorrow night, we’ll have a new member of the United States Supreme Court,” he told the chamber.
McConnell, just after the Senate votes to limit debate on Amy Coney Barrett: "A lot of what we’ve done over the last four years will be undone sooner or later by the next election. They won’t be able to do much about this for a long time to come."
Also, McConnell's right hand, which was deeply bruised earlier this week and prompted several Qs about his health, appears much better. Most of the bruising is gone https://t.co/WPFJcqsog2
Continue reading...The challenger aims to fix the foreign policy upheaval of the Trump years but such an agenda presents many challenges
By any measure, Joe Biden is old in the ways of the world. As Barack Obama’s vice-president, he met all the big international actors. As chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, he helped direct US foreign policy.
After four years of Donald Trump’s manic leadership, the Democrat offers a steady, dependable hand on the tiller. Biden’s grand aim: a glorious American restoration, at home and abroad.
Continue reading...Nine days out from election day, polling shows the Democratic nominee with big leads in key demographics
Joe Biden’s hopes of reaching the White House could rest on two crucial demographic groups that appear to be deserting Donald Trump: elderly people and suburban women.
Related: Trump assaulted American democracy – here's how Democrats can save it
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It’s been a lively day on the election trail. We’re closing this blog now but will be back with all the developments in US political news, as it happens, tomorrow.
Here are the main events of the day:
Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris is calling for an administration that is frank about racist police brutality in America.
“There isn’t a Black man I know, be it a relative or friend, who has not had some sort of experience with police that’s been about an unreasonable stop, some sort of profiling or excessive force,” she said.
We can’t just speak the truth about police brutality in our nation—we must act to change our systems of justice and demand accountability. pic.twitter.com/arSdFLi7Wj
Continue reading...Days before the election, Hunter Biden emails dropped with a roll call of Trump associates involved in ‘discovering’ them – and experts say it probably isn’t the last of the dirty tricks
On 28 October 2016, the then director of the FBI, James Comey, dropped a bomb into the middle of the presidential race. With just 11 days to go until election day, he announced that his agents were investigating a newly discovered batch of emails from Hillary Clinton’s personal server.
Related: ‘What did we all do?’: why women who voted for Trump could decide the 2020 election
Continue reading...Data from the US Elections Project predicts a record 150m ballots, representing 65% of eligible voters, for this election
More than 50 million Americans have cast ballots in the US presidential election with 11 days to go in the campaign, a pace that could lead to the highest voter turnout in over a century, according to data from the US Elections Project on Friday.
The eye-popping figure is a sign of intense interest in the contest between Republican Donald Trump and Joe Biden, his Democratic challenger, as well as Americans’ desire to reduce their risk of exposure to Covid-19, which has killed more than 221,000 people across the United States.
Continue reading...Joe Biden said he would not shut down the country in response to the coronavirus pandemic during a campaign event in Wilmington, Delaware, reinforcing his answers during Thursday's presidential debate.
Donald Trump had claimed Biden would force a nationwide lockdown if he became president, but the Democratic nominee has repeatedly said he does not believe that will be necessary to get the virus under control
And now for a semi-regular feature when I’m blogging, entitled Fun With Polls and basically just a read-off of the averages from fivethirtyeight.com but nonetheless it paints a picture, less than two weeks out from election day.
Herewith, the current scores on the doors in the battleground states, both the ones everyone always thinks of and some – Georgia, Iowa, Texas – which really shouldn’t be close but with this Republican in the White House, are:
What you said about Texas, don’t worry about Texas. Texas is with us. [Democrats] want to take away your guns, your oil and your God. OK, that’s what they want. They want to take away your second amendment. They want to take away fracking and oil. They don’t care. They want to take it away they want to go to the Green New Deal. That’s not for Texas. Texas is not going to be losing the guns, and they’re not going to be losing their oil and they’re not going to be losing their religion or their God.
Following up the post below, Reuters has an eye-catching line about early voting and what it might say about turnout:
More than 50m Americans have cast ballots in the presidential election with 11 days to go, a pace that could lead to the highest turnout in more than a century, according to data from the US Elections Project.
The eye-popping figure is a sign of intense interest in the contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, as well as Americans’ desire to reduce their risk of exposure to Covid-19, which has killed more than 221,000 people across the US.
Grrr....I'm getting emails from orgs cheering 50 million #earlyvote without saying where these data are coming from. All I ask for this free site is attribution. If you want to show appreciation, please donate to this charitable @UF election science fund https://t.co/xtN28Mq9Nn
The Attorney General has to act. He’s got to act, and he’s got to act fast, he’s got to appoint somebody, this is major corruption, and this has to be known about before the election, and by the way we’re doing very well, we’re gonna win the election, we’re doing very well, if you look at all of what’s happening and all of the people that come in and don’t come in, you take a look all around the country and with Texas early voting. Those are our votes and we were doing well in Texas. I mean, I just got to report we’re doing great in Texas, but we’re doing great all over, but forget that, this has to be done early. So the attorney general has to act.
Continue reading...Alexander Hillel Treisman, who was indicted last month, traveled near Joe Biden’s home and purchased an AR-15
A North Carolina man searched earlier this year for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s home online, traveled near the home and wrote a checklist that ended with the word “execute,” according to federal court documents.
The information was contained in documents related to a detention hearing for Alexander Hillel Treisman, who was indicted last month on child abuse imagery charges, held in US district court in Durham. A magistrate, in an order signed 8 October, ordered Treisman to remain in custody.
Continue reading...Joe Biden and Donald Trump have gone head-to-head for the final time before the US election on 3 November in the final television debate, helped by a mute button on the candidates’ microphones that prevented interruptions.
Squaring off in Nashville, Biden had to field aggressive questioning about his son’s business dealings and when Trump compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, the challenger branded his opponent 'one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history'. Here is a look back at the key moments
The closing moments of the final presidential debate focused on climate change. Joe Biden stressed the need to expand sources of renewable energy while again disputing Donald Trump’s claim that he intended to ban fracking, which he does not. 'I know more about wind than you do,' Trump retorted, drawing an exasperated laugh from Biden. 'It’s extremely expensive. Kills all the birds'
Donald Trump and Joe Biden have clashed over the handling of the coronavirus pandemic during the final presidential debate. While Trump says a vaccine will be available within weeks, Biden questioned the veracity of Trump's claims after the president's previous predictions the pandemic would end by Easter. The pandemic has killed more than 220,000 Americans and infected millions more, including the president