Leading candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump contest remains extremely close; polls show result likely to be historically tight
In closing pitches, Harris vows Gaza peace, Trump’s tone darkens
North Carolina sees record turnout at early in-person voting sites
Americans exhausted, riled up or at the very least wanting it all to be over in high-stress vote
The nominees on Democratic tickets spent the final day of the US presidential campaign rallying supporters in critical battleground states, CNN reports.
Vice President Kamala Harris spent the day in different parts of Pennsylvania as her campaign officials projected optimism about what they’ve frequently called an aggressive ground game in the state while acknowledging it’s going to be a close race.
According to CNN, her campaign will conclude later tonight with a rally in Philadelphia. So far, she’s gone door-knocking in Reading, presented a vision of unity and togetherness to people canvassing for her in Scranton and declared her long-standing commitment to Puerto Rico in Allentown.
Spending his day in different parts of Wisconsin, Vice-presidential candidate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, touted Harris’s record and credited her for bringing “back joy to the politics”.
He projected optimism for the polls, when voters get to “shape the future for generations to come”, CNN adds.
US cybersecurity agency director Jen Easterly said on Monday that her department has not seen evidence of any activity that could directly impact the outcome of the election, despite a surge in disinformation, Reuters reports.
She added that the 2024 election has faced an “unprecedented” amount of disinformation from foreign adversaries.
US agencies have warned that Russia and others intend to fan divisive narratives ahead of the election, an accusation Russia has denied.
Read more here.
A Georgia poll worker has been arrested on US charges that he sent a letter threatening to bomb election workers that he wrote to appear as if it came from a voter in the presidential election battleground state, Reuters reports.
Federal prosecutors said Nicholas Wimbish, 25, had been serving as a poll worker at the Jones County Elections Office in Gray, Georgia, on October 16 when he got into a verbal altercation with a voter.
The next day, Wimbish mailed a letter to the county’s elections superintendent that was drafted to appear as if it came from that same voter, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said the letter ended with a handwritten note: “PS boom toy in early vote place, cigar burning, be safe.”
Georgia is one of seven closely contested states expected to decide the outcome of today’s presidential election match-up between Republican former President Donald Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
On the final day of the US presidential campaign, former president Donald Trump hit three battleground states, according to CNN.
In his rally in North Carolina, Trump said he was visiting to urge people to “get out and vote,” adding: “If we get everybody out and vote there’s not a thing they can do.”
In Reading, Pennsylvania, he suggested rival Kamala Harris should be put “in the ring” with former heavyweight champion boxer Mike Tyson, while in Pittsburgh, the former president hailed a late endorsement from influential podcaster Joe Rogan.
Trump is scheduled to hold his final rally tonight in Grand Rapids, Michigan, CNN notes.
Vice-presidential candidate, Ohio senator JD Vance, also jetted around across the country to urge people to get out the vote. In La Crosse, Wisconsin, he criticised Harris’ work on immigration and in Flint, Michigan, he said leaders like Harris have “failed to do their job”.
Podcaster Joe Rogan, who recently interviewed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for nearly three hours, has said he has endorsed the former president in the race to the White House on the eve of the US election, Reuters reports.
Trump faces Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in what polls show to be a tight race. Harris has got multiple celebrity endorsements.
“For the record, yes, that’s an endorsement of Trump,” Rogan said on X.
Australia and India’s foreign ministers have said they were confident the Quad group of the US, India, Australia and Japan would continue to cooperate in the Indo-Pacific region regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election, Reuters reports.
Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong told reporters in Canberra she had met Mike Pompeo, who served as Secretary of State in the previous Trump Administration, ahead of the US election and had “a very good discussion”.
“In terms of the US election, we will work with whomever the American people choose,” she said.
The Quad was “very valuable” in the region, Wong said. “We see it retaining its importance regardless of the outcome of the election,” she added.
“When we look at the American election, we are very confident that whatever the verdict, our relationship with the United States will only grow,” Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said, on an official visit to Australia.
A presidential election unlike any other in US history enters its last full day on Monday with Donald Trump, Kamala Harris and their campaigns scrambling to get supporters to the polls in a contest each portrays as an existential moment for America.
Even after the astonishing blur of events the last few months, the electorate is divided down the middle, both nationally and in the seven battleground states expected to decide the winner on Tuesday, although the closeness of the contest means it could take days for a winner to emerge.
Trump, a 78-year-old Republican, survived two assassination attempts, one by millimeters, just weeks after a jury in New York — the city whose tabloids first elevated him to national fame and notoriety — made him the first former US president to be convicted of a felony.
Harris, 60, was catapulted to the top of the Democratic ticket in July — giving her a chance to become the first woman to hold the world’s most powerful job — after President Joe Biden, 81, had a disastrous debate performance and three weeks later dropped his reelection bid under pressure from his party.
For all of that turmoil, the contours of the race have changed little. Polls show Harris and Trump running neck and neck nationally and in the battleground states.
More than 77 million voters have already cast ballots, but the next two days will provide a critical test of whether Vice President Harris’ or former President Trump’s campaign does the better job of driving supporters to the polls.
Read the full Reuters story here.
The outcome of Tuesday’s knife-edge US election is unlikely to have much of an impact on the tepid ties between Washington and Ankara, although presidential chemistry might help, experts say, AFP reports.
“Today, it looks like both have decided to agree on some issues, disagree on others and look for areas of cooperation,” Soner Cagaptay of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy told AFP.
Such areas include Africa “where Turkiye has built influence, and Muslim Eurasia, where Turkiye has historic influence, where the two could work together”, he said.
Turkiye has long nursed a grudge over Washington’s alliance with a Kurdish militia in its battle against Islamic State insurgents in Syria.
And Ankara’s binary foreign policy choices have infuriated Washington, notably its ties with Russia and China and refusal to join Western sanctions against Moscow.
“Tomorrow, we will make our voices heard,” Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said in a post on X, a day before the US presidential election.
She urged her followers to find their polling station and “make a plan to vote at IWillVote.com.”
President Joe Biden returned to his birthplace in Pennsylvania, making a final campaign stop for Vice President Kamala Harris and again let loose — offering the kind of unfiltered political sentiments that have become fairly common in recent weeks, Associated Press reports.
Biden slammed Harris’ rival, former Republican President Donald Trump, and his supporters on policy issues during a speech in Scranton, but then suggested that he’d hit back — literally — on faux “macho guys.”
“There’s one more thing Trump and his Republican friends want to do. They want to have a giant tax cut for the wealthy,” Biden told the local chapter of the carpenters union. Then, apparently referencing people backing Trump, he added, “Now, I know some of you guys are tempted to think it’s macho guys.”
“I tell you what, man, when I was in Scranton, we used to have a little trouble going down the plot once in a while,” Biden continued. “These are the kind of guys you’d like to smack in the ass.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent proponent of debunked public health claims whom Donald Trump has promised to put in charge of health initiatives, said that Trump would push to remove fluoride from drinking water on his first day in office if elected president, Associated Press reports.
Kennedy made the declaration on the social media platform X alongside a variety of claims about the heath effects of fluoride.
“On January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water,” Kennedy wrote. Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, “want to Make America Healthy Again,” he added, repeating a phrase Trump often uses and links to Kennedy.
Trump told NBC News that he had not spoken to Kennedy about fluoride yet, “but it sounds OK to me. You know it’s possible.”
Arkansas’ four Republican US House members face challenges in this year’s election from Democratic rivals who are mounting uphill battles to break the GOP’s hold on the state’s federal delegation, Associated Press reports.
Republican US Representatives Rick Crawford, French Hill, Steve Womack and Bruce Westerman are seeking reelection in the heavily GOP state. Republicans have held all of the state’s US House and Senate seats since 2013.
Florida’s election will test whether the state maintains its new reputation as a Republican stronghold, or whether Democrats make some gains by tapping into the support for abortion and marijuana ballot questions and the new energy Vice President Kamala Harris brings to the race, the Associated Press reports.
Gone are the days when Florida was looked at as the biggest prize among swing states. After former President Barack Obama won Florida twice, former President Donald Trump carried the state by a whisker in 2016 and then by a much larger share in 2020. In 2022, Republicans took all five statewide seats on the ballot by landslide margins.
Still, there is a lot of buzz over constitutional amendments that could protect abortion rights and legalize recreational marijuana, with both sides of each issue pumping millions of dollars into advertising. Democrats support the ballot measures and hope they boost turnout to give them at least a chance stopping Trump’s third straight Florida victory and keeping US Senator Rick Scott from winning a second term.
The final Iowa poll released this weekend showed Kamala Harris slightly ahead of former President Donald Trump — in a state he had previously carried — partly thanks to support among women for the vice president, CNN reports.
This gender gap has been seen in other states too, CNN quoted Sara Sadhwani, an assistant professor of politics at Pomona College, as saying.
And these women could have a strong influence on the election as they tend to be a more reliable voting bloc, she added.
While Trump enjoys the support of many young men, that demographic isn’t always reliable — meaning they may not actually turn out to vote, perhaps because “they don’t always see the outcome of an election as being something that’s actually going to benefit them in the future”, Sadwhani told CNN’s Rosemary Church on Monday.
Like all parts of the world, countries in South Asia are closely following the US presidential race, keeping an eye out for their interests and preparing to tweak policies based on who among Donald Trump and Kamala Harris prevails on November 5.
Analysts say major regional countries — Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan — are divided in who they would like to be the next US president, but all remain willing to engage with whoever emerges victorious.
On the flip side, US policies are likely to be in the realm of “continuation,” with neither administration applying “a very sharp strategic lens to South Asia,” according to Michael Kugelman, an expert on Washington’s relations with South Asian nations.
“But I do think that you would see a sharper lens, relatively speaking, from Harris than from Trump,” he said.
Read more here.
Bitter rivals Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are embarking on a final frenzied campaign blitz with both hitting must-win Pennsylvania on the last day of the tightest and most volatile US presidential election in memory, AFP reports.
On the eve of Election Day, polls suggest a total deadlock in surveys nationally and in the seven swing states where the result is expected to be decided.
Harris will spend the whole day campaigning in the rust-belt state of Pennsylvania, culminating in a huge rally in its biggest city Philadelphia featuring singer Lady Gaga. Trump will travel to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and then Michigan.
In a sign of how crucial Pennsylvania is to their chances of occupying the Oval Office, Trump and Harris will even hold duelling rallies in the industrial city of Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania is the single biggest swing state prize under the US Electoral College system, which awards influence in line with population.
Disenchantment with both major US political parties is pushing many first-time Muslim voters in Northern Virginia toward abstention or even third-party support, raising concerns for Democrats who traditionally rely on this constituency.
In conversations with visiting Pakistani journalists at a lively shopping plaza in the region, some young Muslim voters cited foreign policy decisions, environmental issues, and unmet domestic needs as reasons for their reluctance to vote for either major party.
The plaza, known for its diverse array of halal restaurants, grocery stores, and pizza shops, has become a central meeting place for Muslims from Virginia, Maryland, and Washington DC.
Store owners are preparing for election day by setting up a large screen in one of the restaurants to broadcast results, and offering free tea and samosas to patrons to foster a sense of community.
Read more here:
With less than 36 hours before US election day in the historically close campaign, here are some Dawn pieces to read while you wait.
First-time Muslim voters in US wary of two-party system
Disenchantment with both major US political parties is pushing many first-time Muslim voters in Northern Virginia toward abstention or even third-party support.
What could a Trump presidency mean for Pakistan?
Some in Pakistan believe that if Donald Trump wins the US presidential election on Nov 5, it could bring favourable outcomes for Imran Khan and US-Pakistan relations.
US election ripple — Pakistan’s future:
Public sentiment towards the US in Pakistan is complex: while anti-Americanism can be politically popular, the US remains a top destination for Pakistani youths pursuing higher education and families seeking residency abroad.
How the US sustains Israel’s warcrimes:
Even when there have been differences about Israel’s conduct, the US has, for the most part, ensured that there must be “no daylight” between the two sides.
Visa fears for international students as US vote nears
The future of student visas — as well as coveted working visas and training visas students can apply for after graduation — is up in the air ahead of the presidential election next week.
Investors take cover in Asia ahead of US election:
Investors are selling yen and taking shelter in cash, India, pockets of China’s markets and Singapore dollars ahead of a US election that could shake out global money and trade flows.
The Palestinian factor:
Michigan is defined as one of the ‘swing states’ that will decide next week’s presidential election in the US. Secondly, it is home to the largest geographic concentrations of Arab-Americans in the country.
What would a Trump or Harris presidency mean for Pakistan?
As the US presidential race unfolds, Pakistan watches closely — yet the outcome is unlikely to stray from the well-worn paths of pragmatism.
America’s president:
Four years ago, Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump was hailed as a return to ‘normal’ and the terminal demise of the far right. In 2024, Trumpism is not only alive and well but the man himself is poised to make yet another victorious bid for the White House.
Will Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris influence the US election?
With voter registrations down among young people in a country where 18 is the voting age, the first challenge for either campaign may be getting them to register to vote at all.
