US election 2024 as it happened: Trump tells New Mexico rally votes are ‘rigged’; Kamala Harris visits Arizona in campaign’s final days

Celebrities continue to endorse Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, with the cast of Marvel’s Avengers movies the latest to promote her candidacy online.

A video posted to X today features actors Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Don Cheadle, Chris Evans, Danai Gurira and Paul Bettany riffing on their characters from the film franchise to call on voters to “assemble for democracy”.

Meanwhile, renowned Puerto Rican performers Ricky Martin, Rita Moreno and Lin-Manuel Miranda penned an opinion article for The New York Times defending people from the unincorporated US territory against racist jokes.

“Like us or not — and it’s obvious that some people really don’t like us — the threads of Puerto Rican culture are woven into our shared American story. That story speaks loudly and proudly to tens of millions of Americans,” they wrote.

“Puerto Rico might not have a vote in the Electoral College, but Puerto Ricans will be voting in states such as Pennsylvania where we could tip the result of a close election.”

Analysis of state voter data shows “signs of an influx of new female Democratic voters in Pennsylvania and new male Republican voters in Arizona”, according to American news network NBC.

“The early votes of new voters – voters who did not show up in 2020 – are of particular interest because they are votes that could change what happens in 2024 relative to the last presidential election,” NBC reported.

As of October 30, the number of new voters in many of the seven closest battleground states is greater than the 2020 margin between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

“In Pennsylvania, for example, Biden beat Trump in 2020 by 80,555 votes. This year, over 100,000 new voters have already cast ballots in Pennsylvania, with more to come,” the outlet reported.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, another battleground state, the number of new voters (86,231 as of Tuesday US time) is eight times the Biden-Trump margin in 2020 in Arizona. “The biggest share of that group of new voters in Arizona so far are male Republicans.”

The overall number of new voters in Arizona is lower than in Pennsylvania, but the margin of victory in 2020 was incredibly small. In the final tally from December 2020, Biden beat Trump by a mere 10,457 votes or 0.3 per cent of the nearly 3.4 million ballots cast in the state.

Confused about how the US Electoral College works? Or how it’s used to determine the next US president?

Watch the video explainer below by Senior Economic Correspondent Shane Wright.

Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, says his son and daughter-in-law won’t move to Texas because of the state’s abortion restrictions, as the campaign highlights the real-world impacts of abortion bans.

Emhoff, speaking on the podcast A Touch More, said his daughter-in-law was from Texas and had thought about eventually moving to the Austin area.

“They’re not going to move there because they want to start a family and, God forbid, something happens, you can’t get the medical treatment,” Emhoff said.

The Harris campaign is hoping to break through to voters with an argument that abortion restrictions cause far-reaching problems for every aspect of reproductive healthcare.

Harris campaigned in Texas last week to highlight the impacts of the state’s strict abortion ban, which prohibits physicians from performing abortions once cardiac activity is detected, which can happen at six weeks or earlier. Since the fall of the Roe v Wade decision, 14 states have banned the procedure at every stage of pregnancy.

AP

Jake Chansley became infamous after revelling in the January 6 riots of 2021 as the bare-chested “shaman” in a fur headdress with horns.

He has spoken to The Australian Financial Review in a rare interview for a man who distrusts mainstream media.

Jake Chansley was among the Donald Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021.Credit: AP

“I don’t think we’re going to see violence from Trump’s supporters,” he told the masthead.

“I think we’re far more likely to see violence from the left, if and when Trump wins.”

Chansley is not allowed to vote on Tuesday due to his actions on January 6, for which he was sentenced to 41 months in prison for obstruction of an official proceeding.

He wishes the riot hadn’t happened but stops short of regret. “If I could go back in time, if I could change anything, I would try to stop the whole thing from happening to begin with. But that’s not how reality works,” he says.

“I think that living with regret is a terrible way to live. So I don’t live with regret and I try to become better in every way, in every situation in my life – the whole thing about how life is 10 per cent what happens to you, and 90 per cent what you do about it.”

But while Chansley appears to have chilled out since 2020, according to the AFR, there are concerns that many others backing the two rival campaigns may not show restraint next week.

White House press officials altered the official transcript of the call in which President Joe Biden appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump by calling them “garbage”, the Associated Press has reported.

This drew objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two US government officials and an internal email obtained by AP.

Biden created an uproar earlier this week with his remarks, which responded to racist comments at a Trump rally made by the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”.

The Trump campaign quickly moved to fundraise off Biden’s remark, and the next day, Trump himself held a photo op inside a garbage truck to try to capitalise on the president’s criticism.

President Joe Biden at the White House earlier this month.Credit: Bloomberg

According to a transcript prepared by the official White House stenographers, Biden told a Latino group on a video call: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters – his – his demonisation of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”

But the transcript released by the White House press office rendered the quote with an apostrophe – reading “supporter’s” rather than “supporters”. Biden’s aides said it showed the president criticising Hinchcliffe, not the millions of Americans who are supporting Trump for president.

Biden himself took to social media to say he was not calling all Trump supporters garbage and that he was referring specifically to the “hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally”.

The change was made after the press office “conferred with the president”, according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office, which was obtained by the news agency.

But the supervisor, in the email, called the press office’s handling of the matter “a breach of protocol and spoilation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices”.

AP

Having angered the childless cat ladies of America, Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance has said he believes he and Donald Trump can win the “normal gay guy vote”.

In an interview with popular podcaster Joe Rogan, Vance also seemed to suggest that white, middle-class parents may let their children have gender transition surgery to create an easier pathway into America’s prestigious Ivy League universities.

Vance pledged to win “the normal gay guy” vote.Credit: AP

“If you are a, you know, middle-class or upper-middle-class white parent and the only thing that you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, like obviously, that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper-middle-class kids,” he said.

“But the one way that those people can participate in the DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) bureaucracy in this country is to be trans.

“Is there a dynamic that’s going on where, if you become trans, that is the way to reject your white privilege?” he added.

Vance also told Rogan about a friend who was a “gay Reagan Democrat”.

“Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if me and Trump won just the normal gay guy vote because, again, they just wanted to be left the hell alone,” he said.

Kamala Harris has arrived in Nevada, where Donald Trump held a rally less than an hour earlier.

The state is featuring heavily in the itineraries of both candidates. “We need you to vote, Nevada. You are going to make the difference in the outcome of this election, and I thank you,” Harris said at the event in Reno.

The Democrats have not lost Nevada since 2004. The so-called “Silver State” has leant left in recent years, but only by narrow margins, thanks to urban centres such as the largely Democratic Las Vegas and the evenly divided Reno in the north-west.

But as our North American correspondent Farrah Tomazin writes here, the bulk of Nevada is made up of smaller, rural areas that lean Republican, and a third of the state’s voters are registered independents.

This means either Trump or Harris could win next week depending on who can mobilise more people to turn up on election day to vote on issues that resonate.

In a battleground fuelled by tourism, gaming and hospitality, few issues matter more to voters than the economy. Nevada has the highest petrol prices in the country (up to $US5 a gallon – or $1.91 a litre) and the second-highest grocery prices ($US294.76, or $425.44 on average per week).

Harris describes Trump as someone who is “unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and he’s out for unchecked power”. “If elected, Donald Trump on day one would walk into that office with an enemies list,” she says.

“When I am elected, I will walk in with a to-do list, on behalf of you. And at the top of my list is bringing down your cost of living. That will be my focus every single day as president.”

She pitches her cost-of-living policies: a middle-class tax cut, the first federal ban on corporate price gouging on groceries, to make housing more affordable by building more homes and taking on corporate landlords who buy up properties and jack up rents, and to raise the minimum wage and removing taxes on hospitality tips.

Donald Trump’s claim today that votes are “rigged” in New Mexico is the latest in a months-long agenda to sow doubt about the election.

As I wrote here a few weeks ago, Trump and his allies have long been laying the groundwork for a swathe of challenges and potential civil unrest should he lose to Kamala Harris.

“They’re gonna cheat,” the former president told supporters at a recent rally. “It’s the only way they’re going to win, and we can’t let that happen. We can’t let it happen again, or we’re going to have no country.”

Make no mistake: election denialism is alive and well in America. According to a new report by the Centre for Media and Democracy, there are at least 239 election deniers actively involved in electoral contests across eight swing states – that is, people who believe the 2020 election was stolen or have refused to certify previous elections or spread disinformation about “widespread voter fraud”.

Among them are 81 leaders of local Republican organisations; 50 are Republicans running for Congress, and some are vying for state executive offices in the crucial swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico.

But here’s the kicker: according to the group’s study, 102 of those election deniers are currently sitting on state-based election boards that can influence the way the vote is counted and certified.

Hold on to your hats, folks. Next week could be wild.

Donald Trump has started speaking at a rally in Nevada, saying he is thrilled to be back in the “beautiful state”.

He says he’d like to start with a simple question: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

Trump vows to end inflation and says he will “stop the massive criminal invasion, some horrible deathly people, we’re not going to allow it”.

“They are destroying our country, we will stop it immediately, and I will bring back something that you haven’t heard about for four years: we will bring back the American dream.”

“That’s all you really need to know,” he says.

Both candidates are hitting Nevada today – while the state has gone to the Democrats for the past three elections, Trump is in with a strong chance this year.

“This is a very big state for us, a very big state for us. I love it,” Trump says.

He says Kamala Harris is “horrible” and “the worst vice president the US has ever seen”.

“Kamala, you’re fired; get the hell out of here,” he says, to cheers from the crowd.