US election 2024 as it happened: Donald Trump takes to the stage at New York rally; positive polls for Harris

Thank you for joining our live coverage of the US presidential election, which is entering its final stages ahead of polling day on November 5.

The big moment of the day was Donald Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden – described by a top Trump adviser as the “centre of the universe” – at which Elon Musk, Hulk Hogan, and Trump’s wife Melania gave the Republican a huge pump-up in an event resembling a campaign launch.

Elon Musk and Melania Trump watch Donald Trump speak at Madison Square Garden.Credit: AP

Trump largely stuck to script, beginning with a message of hope before deriding his enemies and speaking in dark tones about the state of the nation.

A comedian at the rally made offensive jokes about Latinos and Arab Americans, which were immediately latched onto by Kamala Harris’ campaign.

The Democrat campaigned in the key rust belt city of Philadelphia, deriding Trump as “unhinged” after his sold-out rally.

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a rally in Philadelphia.Credit: AP

Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, had a heated exchange with a CNN host over statements from former Trump administration officials calling the ex-president a fascist.

The label has become a key topic of debate as Democrats and anti-MAGA Republicans seek to portray Trump as a dangerous force.

Polls remain super tight. However, the latest major poll released today, conducted by US broadcaster ABC News and The Washington Post, has better news for the Democrats. It shows Harris has widened her advantage over Trump to 51 per cent to 47 per cent from 50 per cent to 48 per cent two weeks earlier – though the difference remains within the margin of error.

Harris will be in the key swing state of Michigan tomorrow while Trump will hold a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, where polls show the Republican has a slight edge.

We will be back with more live coverage of the race tomorrow.

New York: Though he is now a “Florida man”, Donald Trump is still a product of New York City.

The property mogul was once again an agent of chaos in his former home town – a city he now derides as dirty, unsafe and “failing” – when he returned for a blockbuster rally at Madison Square Garden that has been likened to a pro-Nazi protest from 1939.

Donald and Melania Trump at the rally at Madison Square Garden.Credit: AP

Packed with celebrities ranging from retired pro wrestler Hulk Hogan to tech billionaire Elon Musk and UFC boss Dana White, Trump billed the event as a celebration of the campaign, which has just over a week to run, with polls essentially deadlocked.

Outside the arena, streets were closed, traffic was backed up, sirens blared and people in outrageous costumes shouted on the sidewalk. None of these are unusual in New York, where you have to be brash and loud just to be heard.

Read Michael Koziol’s full piece, on the ground in New York, here.

Donald Trump hosted a rally featuring crude and racist insults at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday (Monday AEDT), turning what his campaign had dubbed as the event where he would deliver his closing message into an illustration of what turns off his critics.

With just over a week before election day, speakers labelled Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”, called Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris “the devil”, and said the woman vying to become America’s first female president had begun her career as a prostitute.

“I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” said Tony Hinchcliffe, a stand-up comic whose set also included lewd and racist comments about Latinos, Jews and black people, all key constituencies in the election just nine days away.

A vendor shows merchandise in support of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.Credit: AP

His joke was immediately criticised by Harris’ campaign as it competes with Trump to win over Puerto Rican communities in Pennsylvania and other swing states. Puerto Rican music superstar Bad Bunny backed Harris shortly after Hinchcliffe’s appearance.

The normally pugnacious Trump campaign took the rare step of distancing itself from Hinchcliffe. “This joke does not reflect the views of president Trump or the campaign,” senior adviser Danielle Alvarez said in a statement.

But other speakers also made incendiary comments. Trump’s childhood friend David Rem referred to Harris as “the antichrist” and “the devil”. Businessman Grant Cardone told the crowd that Harris “and her pimp handlers will destroy our country”.

The marquee event reflected the former president’s tone throughout his third White House campaign. Though he refrained from doing so on Sunday, Trump often tears into Harris in offensive and personal terms himself, questioning in recent weeks her mental stability and her intelligence as well as calling her “lazy”, a racist trope long used against black people.

The event was a surreal spectacle that included former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, TV psychologist Dr Phil McGraw, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, politicians including House Speaker Mike Johnson and representatives Byron Donalds and Elise Stefanik, and an artist who painted a picture of Trump hugging the Empire State Building.

AP

Two weeks into the 2010 election campaign, Labor was in trouble. Partly as a circuit-breaker, Julia Gillard announced that from then on, voters would see the “real” Julia. “I’m going to discard all of that campaign advice and professional or common wisdom, and just go for it,” she said.

Gillard was slammed. If voters hadn’t been seeing the “real” her, who had they been seeing? Which was a reasonable question, except that many of those asking it had been criticising her for keeping her real self under wraps. She was damned either way.

Kamala Harris, like Julia Gillard, is finding that, as a woman, she is held to a different standard.Credit: AP/Alex Ellinghausen

Really, these apparently contradictory criticisms were just different expressions of the same underlying suspicion: that there was something false or concealed about our first female prime minister. It’s worth noting her opponent, Tony Abbott, was subjected to some of the same complaints about restraint – though in his case it was often praised, too, as “discipline”.

This theme followed Gillard through her prime ministership: the idea that she was not showing herself; that something was fundamentally opaque. When she did not show “enough” emotion, she was called “wooden”; when she became either upset or angry, she was attacked for confecting such things for political gain.

Read Sean Kelly’s full column here.

With the day coming to an end in the US, both presidential candidates have wrapped up their public campaign events ahead of next week’s election.

Here is what we can expect tomorrow, according to schedules released by each side:

• Kamala Harris and her vice presidential candidate Tim Walz will hold a joint rally in Ann Arbor, in the key swing state of Michigan.
• Walz will stop over in Wisconsin, another important seat in the so-called Rust Belt, which refers to a group of states that used to rely on heavy industry such as steel manufacturing.
• Donald Trump will hold a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, where polls show the Republican has a slight edge.
• Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance will also be in Wisconsin.

Usually, I get political wisdom from Rahm Emanuel, not his brother Ari.

But a quote from Ari, the Hollywood macher, about the gender chasm in 2024 caught my eye.

“This election is gonna come down to probably 120,000 votes,” Ari said. “You probably have 60 per cent of the male vote for Trump, and the female vote is 60-40 for Kamala. It’s a jump ball. We’re gonna find out who wants this more – men or women.”

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are nearly tied in polling.Credit: AP

Are we back to the days of Mars versus Venus? Or did we never leave?

It is the ultimate battle of the sexes in the most visceral of elections. Who will prevail? The women, especially young women, who are appalled at the cartoonish macho posturing and benighted stances of Donald Trump and his entourage? Or the men, including many young men, union men, Latino and black men, who are drawn to Trump’s swaggering, bullying and insulting, seeing him as the reeling-backward antidote to shrinking male primacy.

Drilling into the primal yearnings of men and women – their priorities, identities, anger and frustration – makes this election even more fraught. When I wrote a book about gender in 2005, I assumed that a couple of decades later, we’d all be living peacefully on the same planet. But no Cassandra, I. The sexual revolution intensified our muddle, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence in the 21st century. The more we imitated men, the more we realised how different we were.

Read the full column here.

In his widely televised address, Donald Trump thanked Democratic New York Mayor Eric Adams for saying he didn’t believe the Trump was a fascist.

Debate over the label was set off when Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly told The New York Times he believed Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist”.

New York Mayor Eric Adams was indicted last month on federal corruption charges.Credit: AP

The Britannica dictionary defines fascism, which grew to prominence in the early 20th century in Europe, as, “a way of organising a society in which a government ruled by a dictator controls the lives of the people and in which people are not allowed to disagree with the government”.

Harris said last week said she believed Trump was a fascist.

Trump said at the rally: “You know who I want to thank? Mayor Adams because Mayor Adams has been treated pretty badly.”

“He’s been really great, and he said that they shouldn’t be calling Trump a dictator because it’s not true. That’s nice.”

Adams has been charged over alleged federal crimes related to bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy and soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals. He has pleaded not guilty.

Kamala Harris has described Donald Trump as unstable after a long and rambling address to supporters at Madison Square Garden.

The New York event – featuring Elon Musk, Hulk Hogan and Trump’s wife, Melania – is being viewed as a campaign launch-style set piece designed to build momentum as the race entered its final stretch.

Trump said his message was one of “hope” as he reached out to Arab and Latino voters in what loomed as a tight election on November 5.

But he repeated discredited claims on immigration, described his opponents as “enemies from within”, labelled Harris “low IQ”, and said he would let former independent candidate for president, Robert F. Kennedy Jr – a leading opponent of COVID-19 vaccines – “go wild on health and medicines” in a second Trump administration.

After the speech littered with dark themes about the state of American democracy, Harris said, “Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged.”

“He is seeking unchecked power in his second term, he has promised retribution and jail time for his political opponents, and he has violated his oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States,” she said on X.

Trump just spoke about the wide electoral coalition he says he is building, and highlighted Arab American and Muslim communities.

Yesterday he was in Michigan, the Midwest swing state where Kamala Harris faces a serious challenge due to the Biden-Harris administration’s stance over the war in Gaza.

I spent some time here last week, speaking to Arab Americans in the suburb of Dearborn, on the outskirts of Detroit, created by generations of migrants drawn to the area to work in the auto industry. The ongoing anger is palpable.

“These people, by the way, they’re great,” Trump said. “They just want peace. They want to have peace. Muslims and Catholics and evangelicals and Mormons, and they’re all joining our cause in large numbers, larger than anyone has ever seen in this country before.”

Read this masthead’s feature story on how Arab Americans might vote here.

Trump has now wrapped up his stump speech.

As Trump makes his case to voters in the final stretch of the campaign, the Democratic National Committee is projecting images on Madison Square Garden saying: “Trump = Unhinged” and “Trump = unfit”.

DNC chairman Jaime Harrison said: “Donald Trump has grown increasingly unhinged in the final weeks heading into election day; so much so that those who know Trump best are warning voters that he is dangerously unfit to lead.”

The DNC projects a message reading “Trump = Unhinged” onto Madison Square Garden.Credit: Getty Images

“Trump has been clear he wants to rule as an authoritarian, praising dictators including even Adolf Hitler, and threatening to unleash the US military on American citizens, who he refers to as ‘the enemy within’.”

The Democrat move comes after former White House chief of staff John Kelly described Trump as a fascist who reportedly “wanted the kind of generals Hitler had”.