Harris campaign reportedly fears ‘blue wall’ could crumble; Eminem to introduce Obama at rally – US politics live | US elections 2024

Donald Trump’s roundtable with Latino leaders in Doral, Miami, has just concluded. The audience livened a little as the former president turned his attention, briefly, to immigration.

He repeated baseless and often-aired claims that foreign countries, especially Venezuela, were opening their prisons to send “violent gang members” and drug dealers into the US with military weapons. He called Kamala Harris “a stupid person” as he falsely labeled her Joe Biden’s “border czar”.

His remarks segued quickly into an attack on Democrats for allegedly allowing transgender men to play women’s sports and a somewhat fanciful tale of a “a man who transitioned into, congratulations, a woman” smashing a baseball so hard it hit a female player on the head and “these young ladies said they’d never seen anything like it”.

Perhaps sensing things were going off topic, event host Jennifer Korn, a former White House aide and executive director of the Hispanic Leadership Network, attempted to interrupt with a “Mr President…”

“I’ll leave it at that,” Trump said. “Does anyone else have anything to say?”

Robert Unanue, the president of Goya Foods, the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the US, took the microphone for a lengthy speech praising Trump, then the event wound down with a prayer session.

Honduran televangelist Guillermo Maltonado, founder of Miami megachurch the King Jesus International Ministry, said Trump would be reelected because “there’s a higher assignment for him to finish with this nation”:

God sets up kings. We’re praying for the will of God to make [Trump] the 47th president.

Detroit’s own Eminem will introduce Barack Obama during his rally in support of Kamala Harris this evening in Michigan’s largest city, and likely weigh in on the presidential election, CNN reports.

It’s a rare public appearance by the rapper who has been synonymous with the Motor City throughout his career, and who has occasionally condemned Harris’s opponent, Donald Trump.

The vice-president is not scheduled to attend the event, which begins at 7.45pm and is one of two appearances Obama is making for her campaign today. The former president is also rallying with Tim Walz in Madison, Wisconsin, at 2.30pm.

Donald Trump hasn’t yet turned his attention to issues affecting Latino voters at his round table in Miami.

Instead he’s on a tear about the Biden administration’s policies that encourage the use of electric vehicles:

They want to go to all-electric cars. A charging station is the equivalent of a gas pump … They spent $8b for nine charging stations. It’s so out of control. They don’t want to change.

He was referring to a slow-moving $7.5bn federal program that by May had yielded a small number of charging stations, but has ramped since with more than 1,000 new installations nationwide each week, according to government figures.

Trump is promising that if he is re-elected US businesses would continue to benefit from tax cuts he enacted in his first term:

We gave you the biggest cut in taxes in the history of the country. We have a great foundation to build on a lot of companies coming in very fast.

At one point Trump confused Kamala Harris, the vice-president and his Democratic opponent, with Hillary Clinton, whom he beat in 2016, calling the nonexistent Biden-Clinton administration “the worst ever”.

Donald Trump is telling a roundtable of Latino leaders at his golf resort in Doral, Florida, that he expects Hispanic voters to help sweep him to victory on 5 November.

He claimed falsely that “all the polls” show him ahead among Hispanic voters in swing states, despite surveys showing exactly the opposite.

He kicked off the event by addressing the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, where he was campaigning yesterday. It was a “horrible event” he said, repeating debunked claims about the federal government’s emergency response.

“Fema responded not well, the White House has done a poor job. They should be ashamed of themselves,” he said.

Numerous politicians, including some prominent Republicans, have praised the speed at which federal resources and help reached the hardest-hit areas.

Trump has yet to start answering questions, instead delivering a lengthy monologue with familiar attacks on Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, whom he beat in 2016.

It’s the second time in a week that the former president has addressed Latino voters in Miami.

In a town hall hosted by Univision, the largest US Spanish-language network, on Thursday, Trump mostly dodged awkward questions about immigration, and repeated debunked claims that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets and “other things too that they’re not supposed to”.

The first campaign event of the day is Donald Trump’s round table with Latino leaders, which is scheduled to begin now at his golf resort in Doral, Florida.

Latinos are a voting bloc whose support is expected to be crucial to deciding the election, both in swing states and in states and congressional districts that will determine which party controls the Senate and House of Representatives.

Ahead of the event, Miami’s Trump-supporting Republican mayor, Francis Suarez, told CNN in an interview that he does not believe the former president’s vows to carry out mass deportations and impose draconian policies against undocumented migrants will hurt his support with Hispanic voters:

Law-abiding Hispanics care more about having a prosperous future for themselves and their children than they do about people who are in this country illegally. And so I think there’s a misperception that all they care about is, you know, immigration. And I think … that is, frankly, somewhat racist.

You know, I think Hispanics care more about making sure that they have an opportunity to succeed, making sure that inflation doesn’t crush them every single day as it’s done under this administration. And they’re law-abiding people, like my parents are, who came to this country at 12 and seven from – from Cuba, which is a communist country and has – and has only produced misery and poverty for its people. And they see a lot of the same rhetoric being, unfortunately, espoused by the Democratic party and that’s something that concerns them.

Kamala Harris’s campaign expects Donald Trump to put up a strong performance in the 5 November presidential election that could break apart the “blue wall” swing states for the first time in decades, according to two reports published this morning.

While neither story suggests that the vice-president’s campaign does not think it has a path to victory, the reports underscore the potency of Trump’s bid for office and the fact that the race remains essentially tied despite weeks of vigorous campaigning and fundraising by Harris and her surrogates.

Citing people with knowledge of Harris’s campaign strategy, NBC News reports that they are concerned that the blue wall of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania could, for the first time since 1988, not vote as a bloc in November, imperiling the vice-president’s path to the Oval Office.

The campaign is also concerned that Hurricane Helene’s ravages in North Carolina and the struggles of the controversial Republican candidates for governor are undermining Harris’s chances of winning that state. Here’s more:

Recent discussions have centered on the possibility of an anomaly happening this year with just part of the blue wall breaking its way. The conversations have focused on whether Michigan or Wisconsin “fall” to former president Donald Trump while the two other states go blue, according to three sources with knowledge of the campaign’s strategy.

Losing Wisconsin or Michigan would mean that even if Harris secures Pennsylvania – where both Harris and Trump have spent the most time and resources – she would not reach the necessary 270 electoral votes to win the White House without winning another battleground state or possibly two.

“There has been a thought that maybe Michigan or Wisconsin will fall off,” said a senior Harris campaign official, who stressed that the bigger concern is over Michigan. Two other people with knowledge of campaign strategy – who, like others in this article, were granted anonymity to speak candidly – also underscored deep concern about Michigan. Those people still believe that all the states are close and that there are alternative routes to victory.

A Harris campaign spokesperson pushed back against the notion about deep concerns over Michigan, pointing to recent public polling. A Detroit News poll conducted 1-4 October found Harris, who was campaigning in Michigan on Monday, holding a slight lead in the state, as did a Washington Post poll on Monday.

…

While North Carolina is still in the campaign’s sights and Democrats maintain strong organization and leadership there, the Harris team is far less bullish about victory, four people with knowledge of the dynamics said.

“Of all of the seven [states], that one seems to be a little bit slipping away,” the Harris campaign official said of North Carolina.

CNN, meanwhile, heard from top Harris adviser David Plouffe, who acknowledged that the race may very well remain tight right down to election day:

Historically, it would be unusual to have seven states come down to a point or less,” David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager who now serves as a senior adviser to Harris, said of the battleground landscape. “But I think at this point, you have to assume that’s a distinct possibility.”

Plouffe and other Harris advisers do not believe Trump’s largely outsourced door-knocking and other on-the-ground outreach operations can match what the national Democrats and the Harris campaign – which inherited some of the same team from President Joe Biden – spent a year putting together. But they believe this advantage can only take them so far.

“Democrats wish Donald Trump wouldn’t get more than 46% of the vote,” Plouffe said, referring to the national popular vote percentage the former president secured in his previous campaigns. But in the battleground states, “that’s not reality. He’s going to get up to 48% in all of these states. And so we just have to make sure we’re hitting our win number, which depending on the state, could be 50, could be 49.5.”

Harris to campaign in Texas with eye towards pulling off Senate surprise

Lauren Gambino

Kamala Harris will return to Texas in the final days of the presidential campaign for an event that will highlight the stories of women harmed by the state’s strict abortion ban.

In Houston on Friday, she will appear alongside the Democratic nominee for Senate, Colin Allred, who is locked in an unexpectedly tight race with the Republican incumbent, Ted Cruz.

Democrats have turned their attention to the Texas Senate race, despite a long history of falling short in the Republican-dominated state. With Democrats poised to lose a seat in West Virginia and Montana appearing to slip away, their best opportunity to keep control of the Senate may run through the Lone Star state.

According to a senior campaign official, Harris will travel to Texas from Georgia, two states with the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. The Democrat has repeatedly assailed Donald Trump for appointing the three supreme court justices who voted to overturn Roe v Wade and paved the way for a wave of new restrictions and near-total bans in Republican-led states.

Harris has made abortion rights the centerpiece of her short campaign for the White House. At campaign stops, and the party’s convention, she has shared the stories of women and families affected by abortion bans, among them Texas resident Amanda Zurawski, who nearly died after being denied an abortion under the state’s law.

Zurawski, along with the family of Amber Thurman, a Georgia woman who died after her medical care was delayed under the state’s abortion law, have become powerful surrogates for Harris’s campaign.

Abortion has been a central issue in the Texas Senate race. Allred has made Cruz’s staunch anti-abortion views a central plank of his campaign. Polls show Cruz with a steady lead, though the race has appeared to tighten in recent weeks.

While in Houston, Harris will also sit for an interview with academic turned Ted talks host and popular podcaster Brené Brown.

On the campaign trail, you’ll hear Donald Trump assail the state of the economy and say Kamala Harris is to blame. And you’ll hear Harris vow to lower prices for everything from housing to healthcare.

There is no doubt that Americans have suffered from the wave of inflation that racked the country over the past three years, but has recently subsided. What’s less discussed is that the US economy is, in fact, far healthier than many others.

Just-released forecasts from the IMF, the Washington-based crisis lender whose economic data is closely watched from Wall Street to the White House, shows that the US economy is poised for some of the strongest growth among wealthy nations in the years to come, beating out the United Kingdom, Japan and many European nations:

These are, of course, just projections, and as the Guardian’s Larry Elliott reports, various things could undercut them – including some of the policies Trump is campaigning on: