Trump holds town hall event in North Carolina as Harris campaigns in Michigan – US elections live

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Polls show North Carolina is increasingly competitive, despite previous Trump victories

“I’m freaking out about North Carolina,” one major Trump donor, who was granted anonymity to give his candid assessment of the race, told Reuters. “Georgia and Arizona are not in the bag, but heading in the right direction.”

Reuters has more about the increasingly close North Carolina race between Trump and Harris:

Trump leads Harris by 0.5 percentage point in North Carolina, according to a polling average maintained by FiveThirtyEight, a polling and analysis website. The former president leads Harris by 1.1 points in Georgia and 1.2 points in Arizona. All of those figures are within the margin of error for major polls, meaning either candidate could walk away with a victory…

Some Trump allies privately say the race in North Carolina, which Trump won in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, is too close for comfort, even as they think he still has a slight leg up on Democratic rival Kamala Harris ahead of the Nov. 5 election.

While Trump’s ad spending in the state has been relatively modest compared with most other battleground states, he has hit the campaign trail hard. His four campaign events in North Carolina, including stops in Wilmington and Mint Hill, in the last month outnumber those in any other state except for Wisconsin and Michigan, according to a Reuters tally.

As Trump once again baselessly claims that the Biden administration is failing to give adequate support to Hurricane Helene victims because many of them are Republicans, it’s worth revisiting this report from yesterday, in which two former Trump national security aides said that Trump was reluctant to give emergency funding to California after wildfires in 2018, until an aide showed him that many Trump voters live in California.

“This is Katrina,” Trump says, of the government’s response Hurricane Helene, accusing the Biden administration of doing “the worst job.”

With a reported death toll of over 200 people so far, Hurricane Helene has been a catastrophic storm.

Hurricane Katrina, during the George W Bush administration, claimed 1,392 lives, Axios reported, and sparked fierce debates over the government’s emergency response, with Kanye West famously alleging that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

But Hurricane Maria, during Trump’s presidency in 2017, claimed 2,975 lives, making it the deadliest US storm of the 21st century. Axios reported.

Donald Trump is declining to sit on the armless swivel chair on the stage in Fayetteville, calling it “the most uncomfortable chair”.

“The one thing I don’t want is to fall on my ass, because that’s gong to be--that will be the only story,” Trump said. “I’m not sitting in that sucker,” he added. “I think it was a booby-trap. That was put there by Kamala.”

The crowd cheered.

In Fayetteville, Trump calls Harris “more left by far” than progressive US senator Elizabeth Warren, and “more left by far that crazy Bernie Sanders.”

“I know this will shock you, but that’s just not the case,” Bernie Sanders wrote in the Guardian this summer, in response to this Republican attack line.

At the Fayetteville town hall, an elderly veteran of the Vietnam war who sent Trump his Purple Heart, in tribute to Trump’s survival of the attempted assassination attack this summer in Butler, Pennsylvania, is on the stage asking the former president a question about how Trump will prevent homelessness among veterans, and also “kicking these illegal aliens out of the freakin’ hotels and providing them with money” while veterans remain homeless.

The question may be related to a story that circulated in rightwing media earlier this year, and which turned out to be false:

Trump takes stage in Fayetteville, home to Fort Liberty

“Should we change the name from Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg?” Donald Trump asks the crowd in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home to the army base that was renamed Fort Liberty in 2023, as part of a Department of Defense effort to rename military bases that paid tribute to Confederate soldiers.

The crowd cheered in approval.

“We did win two world wars from Fort Bragg,” Trump adds. “This is no time to be changing names.”

The Associated Press notes: “The North Carolina base was originally named in 1918 for Gen Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general from Warrenton, North Carolina, who was known for owning slaves and losing key civil war battles that contributed to the Confederacy’s downfall.”

Axios is reporting that venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, of Andreessen Horowitz, has emailed his employees to inform them that he and his wife “will be making a significant donation to entities who support the Harris Walz campaign,” after going public with his support for Trump in July.

Horowitz reportedly wrote that “Felicia and I have known Vice President Harris for over 10 years and she has been a great friend to both of us during that time” and said that their donations would be “a result of our friendship.”

The SF Standard previously reported that Horowitz’s public embrace of Trump this summer was seen as an “astonishing about-face” that left longtime friends and acquaintances “scratching their heads,” since the Bay Area couple had previously been longtime Democratic donors, and Felicia had been outspoken about challenges for trans people in US as the parent of a trans child. (Horowitz tweeted angrily about this particular article before it came out, denouncing it as a hit piece.)

Kamala Harris has just wrapped up a rally in Flint, Michigan, focused on her economic policies and support for the labor movement.

Donald Trump is scheduled to hold a town hall in Fayetteville, North Carolina, at 7pm EST, about a half hour from now. Fayetteville is known as an army town: it’s the home of Fort Liberty, the largest army base in the US by population.

“The election is here,” Harris says, noting that ballots are going out and that early voting in Michigan starts in late October.

Harris supporters are now chanting “USA! USA! USA!” as she talks about Democrats’ love for their country and the importance of patriotism.

Harris leads the Michigan crowd in chants of “We are not going back,” one of the signature rallying cries of the campaign, and then adds, “Ours is a fight for the future, and ours is a fight of freedom.” She pivots to abortion, saying that one of three women in the US now lives in a state with a “Trump abortion ban.”

As labor leaders rally support for Kamala Harris in front of a fired-up crowd in Michigan, the Wall Street Journal is reporting today on some behind-the-scenes “wariness” among some labor leaders about Harris’ brother-in-law, the chief legal officer at Uber, and reportedly a close adviser to Harris and her campaign.

Harris pledges to support 'good union jobs' at Flint rally

“I come from the middle class and I will never forget where I come from,” Harris tells the Flint crowd, pledging to support growth in cities like Flint and more “good union jobs,” including jobs “that do not require a college degree,” since a college degree is not the only measure of a worker’s skill or experience.

Harris added, as president, she will highlight which federal jobs do not require a college degree, and challenge the private sector to do the same.

Big cheers from the Michigan rally crowd as Harris references the “solid jobs report” that came out this morning, which showed the country added 254,000 jobs last month.

Kamala Harris in Flint, Michigan. Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/AP

“We are the underdog,” Harris tells a cheering crowd in Flint, Michigan, warning that her supporters needed to keep campaigning hard until election day. “But there’s the thing about us: We like hard work. Hard work is good work,” she adds.

Kamala Harris speaks in Flint, Michigan

Kamala Harris has taken the stage at a rally in Flint, Michigan, to sustained cheers. She was introduced by Eric Price, the president of the local chapter of the United Auto Workers.

“We’ve got 32 days until the election,” she said. “32 days. 32 days.”

In Michigan, Magic Johnson urges Black men to vote for Kamala Harris

Speaking at a Harris campaign event in Flint, Michigan, the NBA legend described his longtime support for the vice president, and emphasized the importance of Black men voting for Harris, CNN reports: