State of the race: Five takeaways from the US election this week

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s campaigns are running wild with last-minute appeals to voters as the country’s presidential election is set to take place in less than three weeks.

What is the week’s biggest political news in a few seconds? Look no further.

We’ll provide you with a primer on the candidates’ standing in the polls and five key takeaways from the previous seven days.

The election at a glance

• How many days left?

There are 23 days left before the November 5 election.

• Harris has a slight lead, according to national polling averages.

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

Another polling average, from the website 270toWin, shows Harris again with a marginal lead, with 49.3 percent support. Trump, meanwhile, is at 46.5 percent.

• Any surprises?

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

A poll conducted by Reuters and Ipsos on October 10 revealed Harris’ Republican rival was 47 percent to 41 among suburbanites, according to the news agency Reuters and market research poll.

However, a poll from Siena College and The New York Times showed Harris might be losing support among Black voters two days later. She pulled in 78 percent support — a drop from the estimated 90 percent support her fellow Democrat, Joe Biden, earned in 2020.

Hurricane Milton becomes disinformation battleground

Milton, a Category 5 storm, sprang into the Gulf of Mexico in three days, earning the highest Saffir-Simpson score.

Rarely have we witnessed such quick growth. Milton is considered to be one of the Atlantic basin’s most intense hurricanes, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

And it was heading straight for Florida, the contiguous state of the United States.

Politicians were also getting ready for a flood of disinformation as Florida prepared for impact.

In the weeks that followed, Trump had made a number of false accusations, including that the Democratic-led federal government was “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.”

Joe Biden, the outgoing president, reacted violently to Milton’s landfall by blasting Trump, his former political rival, in his White House remarks about the storm.

“Over the last few weeks, there’s been reckless and irresponsible and relentless promotion of disinformation and outright lies about what’s going on”, Biden said, calling the distortions “un-American”.

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

In Las Vegas, Harris herself criticized Trump. “This is not a time for people to play politics”, she said, in reference to the Republican.

Trump and Harris spar with the media.

Harris zipped from one interview to the next in a recent media blitz at the start of this week after being previously criticized for failing to cover the national media.

It completely changed the way her campaign started. Harris didn’t give any significant interviews until late August after making her announcement on July 21.

And even then, it was a joint interview with her running mate, Tim Walz. Her first solo interview came a couple of weeks later, on September 13, with a local TV station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

But in the past week, Harris has cranked up the frequency of her media appearances. She appeared on the television talk show series The View and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, as well as on the podcast Call Her Daddy and on the radio with The Howard Stern Show.

Additionally, on Monday, her prerecorded interview with the obnoxious TV newsmagazine 60 Minutes aired.

The two interviews were intended to be one and the same: Donald Trump had been requested to sit down for a recording by 60 Minutes.

But host Scott Pelley announced that the Trump team had pulled out of the agreed-upon interview, citing “shifting explanations”, including that the Republican might be fact-checked on air.

Trump and 60 Minutes had a point where they continued to fight. Trump claimed the newsmagazine was trying to “make her look better” when a teaser version of the Harris interview showed the vice president responding to a question differently than the longer version.

Additionally, he demanded that the Federal Communications Commission “TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE.” The remarks earned a rebuke from the commission’s chair, who warned that such an action would threaten free speech.

Harris refers to health as a benefit over Trump.

Through much of the 2024 election, questions of health and competency have loomed large — even dooming one candidate’s run.

The 81-year-old Biden was forced out of the race for president after a subpar debate performance in June because of questions about his leadership ability and age. It was the culmination of months of speculation and attacks, as Trump dug into Biden as a “weak” and “sleepy” old man.

But at 78 years old, Trump himself has faced questions about his age and mental competency.

This week, those inquiries came back into focus. Last Sunday, The New York Times ran a story analysing Trump’s “rambling” and increasingly longwinded speeches, questioning whether his speech patterns reflected the toll of age.

And then, on Saturday, the White House released a memo touting his Democratic rival’s health.

The 59-year-old Harris, it read, “possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency”.

Trump has long praised his abilities based on his performance on cognitive tests. On Saturday, his campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung responded to the media scrutiny with a statement, arguing that Harris “does not have the stamina” of Trump.

According to Cheung, “all have concluded that he is in excellent and flawless health to be Commander in Chief.”

Trump lays out blueprint for anti-immigrant agenda

Trump increased his attacks on immigrant Americans this week on the campaign trail, continuing a trend of false and obscene claims.

Trump has gone to great lengths to project a hardline image, which has been one of his political career’s defining issues.

However, critics warn that his nativist rhetoric is becoming more extreme, resembling those of white supremacists and other divisive figures.

Trump made up false accusations that murderers were en masse crossing the US border with the Hugh Hewitt Show in an audio interview on Monday.

“Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States”, Trump said. “Now a murderer, I believe this: It’s in their genes. And our nation is currently rife with many bad genes.

The Republican continued to make up stories about immigrants as criminals in interviews throughout the week, most notably on Friday.

Speaking in Aurora, Colorado, Trump pledged that, if re-elected, he would use his first days in office to “expedite the removal” of “savage gangs” from abroad, as well as invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime law, as a tool for mass deportation.

He also urged Americans who murder US citizens to receive the death penalty.

Despite Trump’s portrayals of lawlessness, studies have shown that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at far lower rates than US-born citizens.

Bob Woodward’s book paints unflattering portrait

In the US journalism lexicon, reporter Bob Woodward enjoys near-mythic status.

In 1972, he and his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein helped reveal President Richard Nixon’s role in the Watergate scandal, thereby precipitating the politician’s eventual resignation.

Since then, Woodward has published dozens of books, purporting to show the inner machinations of US politics. His most recent entry, which came right before the presidential election, provided an unflattering glimpse of Trump’s alleged relationship with Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia.

The book, which has the title War, was first announced on Tuesday and will soon be available on bookstore shelves.

A source with the organization claimed that Trump has called Putin at least seven times since he left office on its pages. The book also claimed that, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump sent virus-testing machines that were in short supply to Putin.

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

“None of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man”, Cheung, Trump’s spokesperson, wrote in a statement.

However, Mark Milley, the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the former US military officer with the highest position, is one of the prominent names in the book.

Source: Aljazeera