Trump says he doesn’t expect chaos on election day: ‘Not from the side that votes for Trump’ – live | US politics

Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer has apologized for feeding a Doritos chip to a social media influencer who dropped to her knees after Roman Catholic organizations accused the Democratic politician of insulting their religion by mocking the sacrament of communion.

“I would never do something to denigrate someone’s faith,” Whitmer said in a statement that her office provided to the Michigan television news station WJBK on Friday.

She explained that the stunt in question – captured on video with popular TikTok content creator Liz Plank – was meant to promote legislation signed by Joe Biden in 2022 that is colloquially known as the Chips Act and provided $280bn to research as well as manufacture semiconductors. But it was all “construed as something it was never intended to be, and I apologize for that”, Whitmer said.

On the video, Plank genuflects before Whitmer, who then places a Doritos chip in the podcaster and influencer’s mouth. The governor caps the scene off by gazing at the camera while she wears a hat supporting fellow Democrat Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz in November’s presidential election.

The Michigan Catholic Conference – which has clashed with Whitmer over her support of abortion rights – joined other church groups in condemning Whitmer’s video with Plank.

More on the controversial video here:

Kamala Harris paid a visit to North Carolina, holding a rally in Greenville at East Carolina University a day after her stop in Raleigh.

Over the weekend, she has been meeting with faith leaders and volunteering to help prep supplies for Hurricane Helene victims, which ravaged western North Carolina a few weeks ago.

“I know Helene’s impact was further west, but I also know that the people of Greenville, like all Americans, have been inspired by the way communities are coming together,” Harris said on Sunday at the Koinonia Christian Center in Greenville.

“In a moment of crisis, isn’t it something when you know that often it is the people who have the least give the most,” she said.

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump spent Sunday trying to shore up political support among what they perceived to be must-have voting blocs with polls showing them locked in a tight 5 November presidential race.

With election day less than a month away, the Democratic vice-president attended a Black church in Greenville, North Carolina, as part of her campaign’s “souls to the polls” push. Her Republican opponent was in Arizona, looking for Black and Latino support as he seeks a second presidency, after a rally in California a day earlier.

Both candidates are attempting to get a decisive edge among votes who have not yet decided who to support. Surveys show that early voting, which tends to favor Democrats, is down 45% from previous election years – a sign that there may be millions of undecided voters.

Trump has now switched from condemning early voting as a Democrat plot to engineer his defeat to Joe Biden in 2020 to urging people to vote early and by mail.

A recent ABC News-Ipsos poll showed that support was split down gender lines, with women voting 60-40 to Harris and men breaking for Trump by a similar margin.

Trump needs white women, who supported him in a greater numbers in 2020 than in 2016 – but also Black men. On Sunday, he argued that his fellow former president Barack Obama’s call last week for Black men to support Harris based “solely on her skin color, rather than her policies” as “deeply insulting”.

Here’s more on the candidates’ campaign events:

Donald Trump on Sunday said he does not expect chaos from his supporters on the day of the 5 November election.

Asked on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures if he anticipated chaos from those who support him over Kamala Harris, the former president said: “No, I don’t think. Not from the side that votes for Trump.”

Supporters of Trump aimed a deadly attack on Congress weeks after he lost the presidency to Joe Biden in 2020. The US Capitol attack – launched after he told his supporters to fight like hell – was a desperate attempt to prevent congressional certification of the US president’s victory.

Hundreds of participants have been indicted on federal crimes pertaining to the violence. And Trump himself was criminally charged with illicitly trying to overturn his 2020 defeat in the lead-up to the attack, including by lying about how fraudsters robbed him of winning against Biden.

The Democratic National Committee released a six-figure ad campaign in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania calling out Jill Stein as a “vote for Trump”.

The ad opens with a photo of Stein morphing into the Republican presidential nominee.

“Why are Trump’s close allies helping her? Stein was key to Trump’s 2016 wins in battleground states,” says the ad. “She’s not sorry she helped Trump win. That’s why a vote for Stein is really a vote for Trump.”

Democratic party chair Jaime Harrison, California Senate candidate Adam Schiff, activist Jessica Craven, and others reacted to the ad on social.

David Smith

Media blitz to VP duties: on the campaign trail with Kamala Harris

The View, America’s most popular daytime talkshow, was on commercial break. Kamala Harris sat writing absence notes for students who were missing class to attend the live broadcast. “Is it just today, right?” the vice-president laughed.

She handed over the letters written on notepaper headed “The Vice President”. One said: “Dear teacher, please excuse Dani from class today. She was hanging out with us. Best and thank you for being an educator. Kamala.”

It was an unscripted moment that the studio audience loved but TV viewers wouldn’t see. Harris, running the shortest presidential campaign in modern US history after being unexpectedly plunged into the fight when Joe Biden dropped out, is exploring ways to reveal herself to a wary nation.

Still a relatively unknown quantity, the former California attorney general and US senator is trying to make the electorate feel comfortable about the prospect of President Kamala Harris.

In less than three months the vice-president has raised a record-breaking billion dollars. She has tried to put daylight between herself and the unpopular incumbent figure of Biden, and turn the election into a referendum on her opponent, former US president Donald Trump. She has sought to bring positive vibes to a country that seems to have anxiety in its bones.

She has set out to persuade America to do something that it has never done before in its 248-year existence: elect a woman to the White House – and a woman of colour to boot.

Here’s more on Harris’s media blitz:

Stephen Starr

Republican’s lies about immigrants eating cats in Ohio has led to swell of far-right extremism in Springfield – and beyond

For Denise Williams, the 70-year-old head of Springfield’s NAACP chapter, the past several weeks have been testing to say the least.

Last month, flyers calling for mass deportations of immigrants were distributed by the so-called Trinity White Knights, a group associated with the Ku Klux Klan, in Black-majority neighborhoods in south Springfield.

“I’m telling people: do nothing – don’t approach them. But it’s not easy for people to see this,” she said.

“I think that is what a lot of folks cannot understand – why do we have so much hate?”

About 22% of Springfield residents are African American, according to the US Census Bureau.

“People are mad. African Americans here don’t understand how this is allowed. We just have to take this for a minute. I know it’s hard.”

Trinity White Knights is headquartered in Kentucky, where flyers were also seen by residents of the Cincinnati suburb of Covington in July as part of an apparent recruitment effort. The flyers included a PO box address in Maysville, Kentucky, and a phone number.

Ever since Donald Trump claimed during a 10 September televised debate watched by 67 million people that immigrants in Springfield were eating people’s pets – a claim that has been found to be baseless – Springfield has seen a groundswell in far-right extremism.

Here’s more context on the rise in far-right extremism:

Three major polls were released Sunday, showing Vice-President Kamala Harris either ahead of former president Donald Trump or running a head-to-head race.

Let’s start with the ABC News/Ipsos poll: Harris is ahead by two percentage points with 50% of the support. The poll, conducted between 4 to 8 October, found that 56% of Americans favor deporting all undocumented immigrants, helping Trump’s lead in trust to handle immigration at the US-Mexico border.

Meanwhile, NBC’s poll, conducted during the same time, shows Harris with support from 48% of registered voters, while Trump has the same percentage of support. Another 4% say they are undecided or wouldn’t vote for either option.

CBS also conducted a poll earlier this month, revealing a lead by Harris with 51% support compared to Trump’s 48%. The economy and policy surrounding the US-Mexico border are among the top issues voters are placing as top priorities when deciding on the next president.

Speaker Mike Johnson said that passing additional hurricane aid for states impacted by hurricanes Helene and Milton “can wait” until Congress is back in session after the election.

On Sunday, Johnson CBS’s Face the Nation, where host Margaret Brennan asked him why he thinks it’s fine to wait until November for Congress to pass more aid for Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton victims.

“Well, it can wait because, remember, the day before Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida and then went up through the states and wound up in Senator Tillis’s state of North Carolina, Congress appropriated 20 billion additional dollars to FEMA so that they would have the necessary resources to address immediate needs,” Johnson said.

Tillis was part of a bipartisan group of senators that signed a letter urging lawmakers to think about bringing Congress members back into session this month to pass disaster legislation before the year’s end.