US elections live: 40,000 people expected at Harris speech; Trump makes usual attacks in Mar-a-Lago address | US elections 2024

Chris Stein

Joe Biden has been underwater in public opinion polls for most of his presidency, a problem that came to a head in his disastrous debate against Donald Trump in June, which set off a chain of events that led to Kamala Harris taking his place atop the Democratic ticket.

JD Vance’s message to voters in Saginaw today – he’s focusing most of his time talking about Harris and not her running mate Tim Walz, who he debated earlier this month – is that Harris and Biden are substantively the same – and the vice-president has nothing new to offer.

“I think the fact that so many of our fellow citizens are telling us they’re worse off, and they’re telling us that because they are, that explains why Kamala Harris is going around running as far away as she can from the policies of Joe Biden” Vance said.

He continued, “in fact, you know, between her copying Donald Trump’s policies and her pretending that she doesn’t even know who Joe Biden is, I’m half convinced that tomorrow on the campaign trail, Kamala Harris is going to show up in a long red tie and a red Maga hat, realizing that the American people just haven’t had it anymore.”

Vance mocked Harris, saying: “She’s copying all of Donald Trump’s policy, she might as well copy [his] style too. You know, just complete the bit Kamala. It’s not working so far. Just lean into it a little bit more.”

Chris Stein

Poll after poll has shown that Americans feel the country is on the wrong path, and are looking for change. Speaking in Saginaw today, JD Vance sought to convince voters in the seat of a county that voted for Donald Trump in 2016 then Joe Biden four years later that the Democratic vice-president would not transform the country in the ways that they want:

“As much as Kamala Harris pretends that she is the candidate of change, she is the sitting vice president, she signed off, she bragged about being the last person in the room after the disastrous policies the last four years were made” Vance said.

He continued: “You cannot, Kamala Harris, pretend that you had nothing to do with the Biden administration when you are the sitting vice president. You can’t pretend you had nothing to do with the trillions of dollars in new spending when you cast the tie-breaking vote on trillions of dollars in new spending, you cannot pretend to be the candidate of change when your party has been running the show for the last four years, and the American people have suffered because of it.”

Chris Stein

JD Vance was never involved with “The Apprentice”, the reality show that made Donald Trump even more of a household name before he entered politics.

But in his speeches, the Ohio senator and vice-presidential nominee has adopted Trump’s “you’re fired” catchphrase from the show.

During his remarks on Tuesday in Michigan, Vance said:

I think in seven days, the great state of Michigan is going to tell Kamala Harris, we don’t want any more [of] your word salad. We don’t even want any more of your broken policies. You are fired. Go back to California, where [you] already belong. We want a real president who fights for the American people.

Michigan, along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, are all swing states that helped put Trump in the White House eight years ago, but which Joe Biden reconquered in 2020. This year, polls show voters in all three are essentially evenly divided between Trump and Harris.

Chris Stein

JD Vance continued on with one of several attacks he would make on the Democratic vice-president over the course of his speech.

“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life where, when you ask Kamala Harris what she wants to do for the American people, ask specifically Kamala Harris, how do you plan to fix the inflation that your policies have caused, how do you plan to make it more affordable for our fellow citizens to be able to buy groceries, for example? How are you going to fix the very problems that your policies created? She’ll say, Well, I grew up in a middle class family” Vance said.

He continued “and when you ask her, you know about the terrible chaos at the southern border, or the chaos that we have all over the globe, how are you going to address the problems that your policies cause? She’ll say, well, you know, when I worked at McDonald’s, I was really good at making the hash browns. And I don’t know if I even buy that.”

Chris Stein

JD Vance just took the stage here at a city recreation center in Saginaw, Michigan, where he explained to the crowd why he believes Kamala Harris is not qualified to lead the country.

“We all agree, in this room, that politics is a little absurd from time to time, and sometimes we ought to poke fun at the absurdity of our political process. But you know what’s the most absurd thing about American politics in 2024? That a person like Kamala Harris thinks she can actually lead the United States of America,” the Ohio senator told the crowd as he campaigns in one of the “Blue Wall” swing states that Republicans are hoping to win this year.

Trump is now speaking to a crowd at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

The former president opened his remarks by referring to a story out of Pennsylvania this week where hundreds of ballot applications are being investigated for potential fraud.

Trump then quickly moved on to attacking vice-president Kamala Harris and is now discussing the issue of immigration in the United States.

Trump so far not addressed the controversial remarks made by a comedian at the Trump rally on Sunday at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, where Puerto Rico was described as a “floating island of garbage.”

New polling has found that Donald Trump’s support among young Black men has decreased since August, while Kamala Harris’s has grown.

A new NAACP survey, conducted between Oct. 11-17, found that 21% of Black men under 50 years old said they would for the former president, down from 27% in August.

Harris’s support among this group jumped from 51% to 59 % over that same time frame, the researchers said.