State of the race: Five takeaways from this week’s US election | News about the 2024 US election

With the United States presidential election just three weeks away, the campaigns of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are in full swing, making last-minute appeals to voters.

Need a quick breakdown of the week’s top political news? Look no further.

We’ll bring you up to speed with five key takeaways from the last seven days and give you an overview of where the candidates stand in the polls.

The choice at a glance

There are still 23 days until the election on November 5th.

• National polling averages show Harris with a slight lead

As of October 11, poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight shows Vice President Kamala Harris up 2.5 points, with 48.5 percent support compared to former President Donald Trump’s 46 percent.

Another poll average from the website 270toWin shows Harris once again holding a narrow lead with 49.3 percent support. Trump is now at 46.5 percent.

Harris, the Democrat, could be poised to flip one of Trump’s key demographics: suburban voters.

On October 10, the Reuters news agency and the Ipsos market research poll released a poll showing Harris leading her Republican rival among suburban voters 47 percent to 41 percent.

But two days later, the New York Times and Siena College released a poll that suggested Harris could be slipping among black voters. She received 78 percent support — a decline from the estimated 90 percent her fellow Democrat Joe Biden received in 2020.

Hurricane Milton becomes a battlefield for disinformation

Within three days of forming in the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Milton had developed into a powerful Category 5 storm, the highest on the Saffir-Simpson scale.

Such rapid development had rarely been seen. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called Milton “one of the most intense hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic basin.”

And it went straight to Florida, the southernmost state in the contiguous United States.

But as Florida braced for the impact, politicians prepared not only for violent winds and storm surges, but also for a deluge of disinformation.

Parts of the U.S. South were still recovering from Hurricane Helene in September, and in the weeks since, Trump had made a series of false claims, including that the Democratic-led federal government was “doing everything possible not to hurt people in Republican areas.” help”. “.

The night Milton made landfall, outgoing President Joe Biden hit back, using his comments at the White House about the storm to blast Trump, his former political rival.

“The last few weeks have seen the spread of reckless, irresponsible and relentless disinformation and outright lies about what is going on,” Biden said, calling the distortions “un-American.”

“Former President Trump led this onslaught of lies,” he added.

Harris herself criticized Trump in her remarks in Las Vegas. “This is not the time for people to do politics,” she said, referring to the Republican.

Trump and Harris are feuding with the mainstream media

After Harris was criticized for not appearing in national media, he raced from one interview to the next earlier this week as part of a recent media offensive.

It was a stark contrast to the start of her campaign. After announcing her candidacy on July 21, Harris did not appear in a major interview until late August.

And even then, it was a joint interview with their vice president, Tim Walz. She gave her first solo interview a few weeks later, on September 13th, on a local television station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

But over the past week, Harris has increased the frequency of her media appearances. Within two days, she appeared on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, on radio with The Howard Stern Show, and on television with talk show appearances on “The View” and “The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert.

And her recorded interview with the renowned TV news magazine 60 Minutes was also broadcast on Monday.

The final interview was supposed to be part of a pair: 60 Minutes had invited Donald Trump to also sit down for a recording.

But host Scott Pelley announced that the Trump team had pulled out of the arranged interview, citing “changing explanations,” including that the Republican may be subject to fact-checking on air.

The tension between Trump and 60 Minutes didn’t end there. When a teaser version of the Harris interview showed the vice president answering a question differently than in the longer version, Trump accused the news magazine of trying to “make her look better.”

He also called on the Federal Communications Commission to “take away the CBS license.” The comments were rebuked by the commission’s chairman, who warned that such action would endanger freedom of expression.

Harris touts health as an advantage over Trump

Issues of health and competency loomed large throughout much of the 2024 election — and even doomed one candidate’s candidacy.

After a dismal performance in the June debate, Biden, 81, was forced out of the presidential race amid questions about his age and leadership abilities. It was the culmination of months of speculation and attacks when Trump called Biden a “weak” and “sleepy” old man.

But at age 78, Trump himself faced questions about his age and mental capacity.

These questions came back into the spotlight this week. Last Sunday, the New York Times ran an article analyzing Trump’s “rambling” and increasingly long-winded speeches, questioning whether his speech patterns reflected the toll of age.

And then the White House released a memo on Saturday noting the health of his Democratic rival.

The 59-year-old Harris, it said, “possesses the physical and mental resilience required to successfully discharge the duties of the presidency.”

Trump has long touted his performance on cognitive tests as evidence of his abilities. On Saturday, his campaign spokesman Steven Cheung responded to the media scrutiny with a statement arguing that Harris “does not have the staying power” of Trump.

“Everyone has concluded that he is in perfect and excellent health to be commander in chief,” Cheung wrote of Trump.

Trump presents a blueprint for an anti-immigrant agenda

On the campaign trail this week, Trump escalated his attacks on migrants in the United States, continuing a series of false and inflammatory claims.

Immigration has been one of the defining issues of Trump’s political career, and he has gone to great lengths to project a hard-line image.

But critics warn that his nativist rhetoric has become increasingly extreme, reflecting the sentiments of white supremacists and other controversial figures.

On Monday, Trump recorded an audio interview with The Hugh Hewitt Show in which he repeated false claims that murderers were crossing the border into the US en masse.

“Many of them have murdered far more than one person and are now living happily in the United States,” Trump said. “As a murderer, I believe this: it’s in their genes. And we have a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

The Republican continued to play up the specter of immigrants as criminals in his appearances throughout the week, especially on Friday.

Speaking in Aurora, Colorado, Trump promised that if re-elected he would use his first days in office to “expedite the expulsion” of “savage bands” from foreign countries, citing the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a time of war, law is invoked as an instrument for mass deportation.

He also called for the death penalty for migrants who killed U.S. citizens.

Despite Trump’s portrayals of lawlessness, studies have shown that undocumented immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens.

Bob Woodward’s book paints an unflattering portrait

Reporter Bob Woodward enjoys almost mythical status in US journalism.

In 1972, he and his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein helped expose President Richard Nixon’s role in the Watergate scandal, which ultimately led to the politician’s resignation.

Since then, Woodward has published dozens of books purporting to expose the inner machinations of U.S. politics. His latest post, which landed in the middle of the heated presidential campaign, offered an unflattering glimpse into Trump’s alleged relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The book, titled “War,” was published in news outlets on Tuesday before hitting bookstore shelves.

On its pages, an unnamed adviser claimed that Trump had called Putin at least seven times since leaving office. The book also claimed that Trump sent scarce virus testing equipment to Putin at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since then, news outlets have struggled to independently verify some of the book’s most headline-grabbing claims. And Trump’s team completely refuted them, calling Woodward an “angry little man.”

“None of these fabricated stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly insane and deranged man,” Cheung, Trump’s spokesman, wrote in a statement.

However, the book does contain some high-profile named sources, including former Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley – once the highest-ranking military officer in the US.

He tells Woodward in the book that Trump is “fascist through and through.”