Harris says gen Z ‘impatient for change’ as she targets youth vote at Michigan rally – US election live updates

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I’m out in central Phoenix at a restaurant where a host of Latino actors, influencers and politicians are rallying for Kamala Harris and Ruben Gallego, the state’s Democratic senator nominee, in an event called “pachanga to the polls.”

Signs, pins and shirts around the venue show Harris and Gallego on loteria cards in the unexpectedly rainy day in the desert city.

Rosario Dawson, an actor and longtime activist, said she had been involved in political causes since childhood because of her family, and she had now just brought her daughter to the polls to vote for the first time.

“I have been walking in marches since Al Sharpton still wore tracksuits,” Dawson said.

The raucous crowd of ardent Harris supporters, wearing camo hats and holding blue Harris signs, cheered for Gallego and resoundingly answered yes when asked if they had already voted.

Democratic senator Mark Kelly introduced his wife, former representative Gabby Giffords, who was injured in an assassination attempt when she was a member of Congress. He said she was responsible for getting him into the business.

“Sometimes I think to myself, if I was the person who would have been injured, would Gabby have become an astronaut?” he joked.

Giffords spoke about how Joe Biden reached out to her during her recovery and called him a great man, and said Harris would defeat the gun lobby.

Senator Marco Rubio is now on the stage and is accusing the mainstream media of attempting to “undermine and prevent Trump from being elected”.

He’s also making fun of Harris’ laugh.

Observers have suggested the Trump campaign is trying to lay the foundation for claiming the election was stolen if he loses by planting the idea that the only way he could lose is because Democrats cheat.

Next up we’re expecting Donald Trump to take the stage in Macon, Georgia, where Arkansas governor and former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is currently warming up the crowd.

Georgia is another swing state – it went for Biden in 2020 by 11,779 votes, out of 5m ballots cast, the first time since 1992 that the state turned blue.

And that’s it from Harris, who wraps up her speech, waves to supporters and makes her exit to the familiar sound of Beyoncé’s Freedom.

Harris hones in on young people at Michigan rally

After taking about her history as a prosecutor, Harris also hones in on young people and first-time voters, proclaiming “I love Gen Z!”

“You are all rightly impatient for change,” she says, repeating remarks she has made recently about the younger generation having grown up only knowing the climate crisis, active shooter drills and with women having fewer rights than their mothers.

She starts by making remarks on the Middle East, noting in particular the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.

As president I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure and ensure the Palestinian people can ensure their right to dignity, freedom, and self-determination.

Michigan is the swing state with the US’s largest Arab American population and many have been dismayed by the Biden administration’s response to the Gaza war. While calling for peace, it has also supplied Israel with billions of dollars worth of weapons.

Kamala Harris has taken the stage in East Lansing, Michigan. We’ll bring you any standout moments as they happen. This is Helen Livingstone taking over from my colleague, Coral Murphy Marcos.

The day so far

• The Trump campaign claimed that recent polling by the New York Times and the Des Moines Register is designed to suppress Trump voter turnout by presenting a bleak picture of Trump’s re-election prospects. The memo claims that the Times’s polls have biased samples and overrepresent Democratic voters compared with actual voter registration and turnout trends.

• Kamala Harris made several stops in Michigan today, delivering remarks at a church service in the morning and later visiting a chicken and waffles joint in Detroit. She’ll be holding a rally later today in East Lansing.

• Donald Trump delivered a speech in Lancaster county, a sector that rarely ever switches parties, usually voting for the Republican nominee in presidential elections. The former president told supporters that he should have stayed in the White House, despite his losing the 2020 election, while at Lititz.

• Harris dodged a question on whether she voted for California’s Proposition 36, which would make it easier for prosecutors to send repeat shoplifters and drug users to jail or prison, after submitting her ballot. The measure would roll back provisions of Proposition 47, which downgraded low-level thefts and drug possession to misdemeanors.

• After a speech in Pennsylvania, Trump delivered his remarks in Kinston, North Carolina. He accused his opponent Kamala Harris of doing “the worst job ever on hurricane salvage and removal” and attacked Senate GOP minority leader Mitch McConnell.

That’s all from me, Coral Murphy Marcos, for today. My colleague Helen Livingstone will be along shortly to continue bringing you all the latest from the US election.

Kamala Harris is scheduled to deliver remarks in about half an hour in East Lansing, Michigan, taking the stage at Michigan State University.

Harris landed at Detroit Metro airport at 1am this morning, and stopped in several locations in Detroit before heading to the Jenison Field House arena for her speech at 6pm ET.

This morning, Harris delivered remarks at a Sunday church service in Detroit and later visited Kuzzo’s Chicken & Waffles, joined by Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and Detroit mayor Mike Duggan.

Edward Helmore

Donald Trump disputed an Iowa poll showing Kamala Harris ahead in red state.

The former president has passionately disputed a shock Iowa poll that found the vice-president leading Trump in the typically red state 47% to 44%.

“No President has done more for FARMERS, and the Great State of Iowa, than Donald J. Trump,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social network on Sunday morning. “In fact, it’s not even close! All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT.”

Trump continued, in all caps: “I love the farmers, and they love me. And they trust me.” More than 85% of Iowa’s land is used for farming and it produces more corn, pigs, eggs, ethanol and biodiesel than any other state.

On Saturday, the Selzer poll carried out for the Des Moines Register newspaper showed Harris ahead of her Republican rival by three points. Selzer is a widely respected polling organisation with a good record in Iowa; she shot to polling fame in 2008 when she predicted that a virtually unknown senator, Barack Obama, would beat frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses.

If Harris were even competitive in Iowa – which Trump won in both 2016 and 2020 – it could radically reshape the race.

The pollster told MSNBC on Sunday that Harris was leading in early voting in Iowa “because of her strength with women generally, even stronger with women aged 65 and older. Her margin is more than 2-to-1 – and this is an age group that shows up to vote or votes early in disproportionately large numbers.”

Earlier on Sunday, Trump’s campaign released a memo from its chief pollster and its chief data consultant calling the Des Moines Register poll “a clear outlier” and saying that an Emerson College poll – also released Saturday – more closely reflected the state of the Iowa electorate.

The Emerson poll found 53% of likely voters support Trump and 43% support Harris, with 3% undecided and 1% planning to vote for a third-party candidate.

The Trump campaign, which many Democrats believe is setting the stage for a series of legal challenges to poll results, also said in an email that the Des Moines Register poll and a subsequent New York Times swing state poll that found Harris ahead in four of the seven states, is “being used to drive a voter suppression narrative against President Trump’s supporters”.

Here’s more context on the Selzer poll:

Donald Trump kept his speech short in Kinston, North Carolina, sticking to most of the talking points he uses during his rallies.

He accused Kamala Harris of ruining the economy, delivered anti-immigrant remarks, promising to impose harsher measures on the southern border, and encouraged members of the crowd to “fight, fight fight”.

FCC regulator claims Harris appearance on SNL violates ‘equal time’ rule

Edward Helmore

A US government communications regulator has claimed that Vice-President Kamala Harris’s surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live violates “equal time” rules that govern political programming.

Brendan Carr, a commissioner with the federal communications commission (FCC), claimed on the social platform X that Harris’s appearance on the show “is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule”.

Carr made the claim in response to an Associated Press alert to Harris being on the show that night.

“The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct – a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election. Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns,” said Carr, who was nominated by both Trump and Biden and confirmed unanimously by the Senate three times.

FCC guidelines state: “Equal opportunities generally means providing comparable time and placement to opposing candidates; it does not require a station to provide opposing candidates with programs identical to the initiating candidate.”

A spokesperson for the FCC issued a statement: “The FCC has not made any determination regarding political programming rules, nor have we received a complaint from any interested parties.”

Harris joined comedian Maya Rudolph at the start of the show in a sketch that skewered Donald Trump for his recent rally speeches, including wearing an orange and yellow safety jacket, a riff on the ongoing garbage controversy, and pretending to fellate a broken microphone.

Harris began her “mirror image” sketch opposite Rudolph, the SNL cast member selected to impersonate her, on the other side of a mirror.

“I’m just here to remind you, you got this, because you can do something your opponent can’t do – you can open doors,” Harris told Rudolph, seemingly referring to a video from earlier in the week in which Trump had struggled to reach the handle of a garbage truck he briefly rode in to a Wisconsin rally.

Here’s more on the claim by the FCC regulator:

Senator Raphael Warnock condemned Donald Trump after saying that, whether women like it or not, he will “protect women”.

Warnock told NBC News that the comment ‘sounds rather ominous coming from the mouth of a convicted sexual predator. We don’t need a predator, we need a president in the Oval Office, and that person is clearly Kamala Harris.’

Donald Trump holds rally in Kinston, North Carolina

Donald Trump started delivering his remarks in Kinston, North Carolina, about two hours behind schedule.

So far, he’s accused his opponent Kamala Harris of doing “the worst job ever on hurricane salvage and removal” and attacked Senate GOP minority leader Mitch McConnell.

“Hopefully we get rid of Mitch McConnell pretty soon,” Trump said. “Can you believe he endorsed me? Boy, that must’ve been a painful day in his life.”

Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, said he expects the winner of the presidential election to be declared on election day.

In an interview with ABC News, the former president was asked whether he thought there was any way he could lose.

“Yeah, I guess, you know,” Trump said. “I guess you could lose, can lose. I mean, that happens, right? But I think I have a pretty substantial lead … Bad things could happen. You know, things happen, but it’s going to be interesting.”

He also told the outlet’s chief Washington correspondent, Jonathan Karl, that he has “a substantial lead” in the presidential race.

Kamala Harris dodged a question on whether she voted for California’s Proposition 36, which would make it easier for prosecutors to send repeat shoplifters and drug users to jail or prison, after submitting her ballot.

“I am not gonna talk about the vote on that because, honestly, it’s the Sunday before the election and I don’t intend to create an endorsement one way or the other,” Harris told reporters.

The measure would roll back provisions of Proposition 47, which downgraded low-level thefts and drug possession to misdemeanors.

Trump says ‘I shouldn’t have left’ White House, despite losing 2020 election

Donald Trump told supporters that he should have stayed in the White House, despite his losing the 2020 election, while at Lititz in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Saturday.

The former president’s remarks were made during one of his final rallies of the campaign, where he also denounced public polls putting him behind his rival Kamala Harris and joked that reporters could take a bullet for him.

The comments were off script – an acknowledgment of how he has become increasingly uninhibited as the fatigue of doing multiple rallies a day has inexorably taken its toll.

Trump stayed on message for some of his remarks, saying illegal immigration was down and the economy was up when he was president. His team has noted with satisfaction for weeks that they remain the top two issues for undecided voters across the battleground states.

But Trump could not resist reverting to his most problematic impulses of describing Democrats as “demonic” and then lamenting about the 2020 election, an issue that polls poorly and his team had thought they had convinced him to let it go.

“We had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” Trump said. “I shouldn’t have left, I mean honestly, we did so well, we had such a great – ” and then abruptly cut himself off.

The remark reflected what Trump told aides and allies in the aftermath of his 2020 election defeat, a loss he has never conceded, and how he sat in at least one meeting at the end of his first term where he mused about refusing to leave the White House, a person familiar with the matter said.

Once Trump started on the 2020 election, he could not stop. He revived debunked conspiracy theories from 2020 and suggested anew that voting machines would be hacked, and efforts to extend polling hours in Pennsylvania – what his own team has pushed for – amounted to fraud.

Trump also spent time at the rally lashing out at a series of recent polls, notably a Des Moines Register poll in Iowa that put him four points behind Harris in the state of Iowa. Harris is universally not expected to win Iowa, but it could be indicative of her momentum in the final days.

Here’s more context on the rally:

The Harris campaign condemned former president Donald Trump’s comments at a rally in Pennsylvania earlier today, where he accused Democrats of stealing the elections from President Joe Biden and expressed it “should be illegal” to release polls that are bad for him.

“Trump is spending the closing days of his campaign angry and unhinged, lying about the election being stolen because he’s worried he will lose,” said Ammar Moussa, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign.

“The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth and will walk into the Oval Office focused on them – that’s Vice President Harris,” she added.