President Donald Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden will both rally supporters on Thursday in the critical battleground state of Florida, campaigning in the same city hours apart and putting on full display their differing approaches to the resurgent coronavirus pandemic, writes James Oliphant for Reuters.
Opinion polls show Biden with a significant edge nationally, but his lead is tighter in battleground states. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday showed Trump had essentially moved into a tie with Biden in Florida, with 49% saying they would vote for Biden and 47% for the president.
With its 29 electoral votes, the state is a major prize in next Tuesday’s election. Trump will stage an outdoor rally in Tampa. Biden, in contrast, will hold a drive-in rally.
In the Reuters/Ipsos poll in Florida, 48% of likely voters said Biden would be better at handling the pandemic, while 42% said Trump would be better. Some 52% said Trump would be better at managing the economy, against 41% for Biden.
More than 75 million people have cast early in-person and mail ballots, according to data compiled by the US Elections Project at the University of Florida. That is a record-setting pace and more than 53% of the total 2016 turnout.
Trump will likely be touting new government data on the nation’s gross domestic product during the third quarter which is expected later today. While the numbers are likely to show a record jump in growth as compared with the calamitous second quarter of the year, economists have cautioned that a recovery from the coronavirus hit is far from complete.
Federal agencies warn US healthcare system is facing an “increased and imminent” threat of cybercrime
Federal agencies have warned that the US healthcare system is facing an “increased and imminent” threat of cybercrime, and that cybercriminals are unleashing a wave of extortion attempts designed to lock up hospital information systems, which could hurt patient care just as nationwide cases of Covid-19 are spiking.
In a joint alert Wednesday, the FBI and two federal agencies warned that they had “credible information of an increased and imminent cybercrime threat to US hospitals and healthcare providers”. The alert said malicious groups are targeting the sector with attacks that produce “data theft and disruption of healthcare services”.
The cyberattacks involve ransomware, which scrambles data into gibberish that can only be unlocked with software keys provided once targets pay up. Independent security experts say it has already hobbled at least five US hospitals this week, and could potentially impact hundreds more.
The offensive by a Russian-speaking criminal gang comes less than a week ahead of the election, although there is no immediate indication they were motivated by anything but profit.
Here’s an update on the progress of Zeta, which has weakened to a tropical storm as it barrels northeast after causing havoc along the coast. It had ripped through Louisiana and Mississippi, where storm-weary residents were advised to stay indoors overnight while officials assessed the havoc the storm had wrought.
The storm raged onshore Wednesday afternoon in the small village of Cocodrie in Louisiana as a strong Category 2 and then moved swiftly across the New Orleans area and into neighboring Mississippi, bringing with it both fierce winds and storm surge.
Joel Martinez, who until just recently lived in the lower apartment, makes a photo of Washington Garden’s Apartments after it collapsed from the winds brought by Hurricane Zeta. Photograph: Kathleen Flynn/Reuters
There was heavy rain at times but since the storm was so fast-moving, rain related flooding wasn’t as much of a concern, reports the Associated Press.
Waveland Mayor Mike Smith told WLOX-TV that his Mississippi Gulf Coast city, which was part of the area most heavily damaged by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina has maybe taken the worst hit since then from Zeta.
“We’re going to see a whole lot of damage in the morning,” Smith said. Among the many trees blown down was one that fell on Smith’s own house. “It was my next-door neighbor’s and he wanted to give it to me, apparently,” Smith said.
An election campaign sign sits in a tree as Hurricane Zeta sweeps through New Orleans, Louisiana. Photograph: Kathleen Flynn/Reuters
In Louisiana, Gov. John Bel Edwards was expected Thursday to tour the coastal regions hardest hit by the storm. During a radio interview Wednesday evening, Edwards said the wind had caused extensive structural damage. And as neighbors and church groups started reaching out to help those affected, he also highlighted the need to protect against the coronavirus at the same time.
“Offer the help but do it with a mask on,” he said.
If you want to keep tabs on where everyone is going to be today, here’s what you need to know.
President Donald Trump will deliver remarks at a ‘Make America Great Again’ event at 1:35 p.m in Tampa, Florida. At 5:15 p.m. the president and the first lady will participate in a troop engagement at Fort Bragg. At 6:30 the president then delivers remarks at another rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
At 2:10 CDT vice president Mike Pence will deliver remarks at a rally in Des Moines, Iowa. At 5:00 p.m. PDT the vice president will deliver remarks at an event in Reno, Nevada.
Democratic nominee Joe Biden is traveling to Florida on Thursday to discuss bringing Americans together. In the afternoon the former vice president will deliver remarks at an event in Broward County. In the evening Biden will deliver remarks at a drive-in event in Tampa - just a few hours after Trump has visited.
The Democratic nominee for vice president, Kamala Harris, is participating in a Divine Nine mobilization event. Later in the day Harris will do a ‘Biden for president fundraiser’. Still later she will join a Fighting for a Living Wage rally hosted by Bernie Sanders.
We’ve got this from Andrew Lawrence today, who has been looking at how the sense of purpose around the 2020 presidential race has been shaped in no small part by a year of activism throughout US sports:
Black Lives Matter landed on NBA and WNBA courts and jerseys, and voter registration became the focus of recurring league PSAs. And when protests erupted again after Kenosha police shot Jacob Blake within an inch of his life three months later and the Milwaukee Bucks walked off of a play-off game and triggered a two-day sports blackout, one of the biggest concessions they won from their NBA partners was a pledge to convert some 20-odd league arenas into polling places in response to Donald Trump’s attempts to suppress and undermine in-person and mail-in balloting.
Last Saturday, on the first ever day of early voting in New York state, thousands of masked Manhattanites wrapped the streets and avenues around Madison Square Garden, with some waiting as long as five hours to cast their ballots. The scene was similar, if a bit more brisk, at the Golden 1 Center in Sacramento and at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte. That a team owned by someone as famously apolitical as Michael Jordan could have a hand in this historic election turnout is a welcome twist. The kicker: he’s also written $2.5m-worth of checks to fight black voter suppression as part of a 10-year, $100m pledge to beat systemic racism
Republican and Democrat lawmakers grilled the CEOs of tech giants Twitter, Facebook and Google yesterday in a hearing about section 230, a federal law protecting internet companies from legal liability for content generated by its users. While Republicans focused on disinformation and the ‘censoring’ of Donald Trump, Democrats accused their rivals of politicising the hearing, while also questioning the mechanics of the platforms that promoted content they deemed divisive. Here’s your highlights…
'Who the hell elected you?' Big tech CEOs grilled in US Senate hearing – video
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris held rallies 30 miles apart Wednesday, but voters could be forgiven for thinking they were running in two different universes.
In Trump’s world, the coronavirus crisis is exaggerated and the biggest danger to the country is a threat of socialism or communism, while top-of-mind issues include allegations of corruption by Joe Biden’s son Hunter and a “deep state” of government officials plotting against the president.
In the Biden-Harris world, the pandemic is an overarching issue that is crushing middle-class pocketbooks, health care access is threatened by an incompetent president and the country is on a knife’s edge between a return to normalcy and a march to authoritarianism.
Symbolic of the two attitudes, Trump’s rally featured supporters packing into a section of Phoenix Goodyear Airport, many of them elbow to elbow and maskless, while Harris held a drive-in event that was sparse and heavily socially distanced, with attendees covering their faces even when nobody was near them.
Steven Greenhouse has been in Lordstown for us, speaking to Ohioans. Trump’s message of bringing back jobs resonated with workers there – but after GM announced it was shuttering its Lordstown plant, some questioned why they voted for him.
In July 2017, Trump spoke in Youngstown and told the crowd that on his way in from the airport, he had seen the carcasses of too many factories and mills. He bemoaned Ohio’s loss of manufacturing jobs, but then boldly assured the crowd: “They’re all coming back!” He next told his audience, many of them workers worried about plant closings: “Don’t move! Don’t sell your house!”
Laid-off GM Lordstown workers still rail about that speech. Many moved to other cities to find work; many lost money selling their homes. “Some of my hardest days of the last few years came when everybody left,” Trisha Amato told me. “They had to sell their houses.” Hundreds of longtime Lordstown workers moved to take jobs at GM plants in Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee and Texas – all so that they could continue receiving good United Auto Workers (UAW) wages (around $30 an hour) and accrue additional years toward their pensions. Many in this diaspora make the four- to 10-hour drive back to the Mahoning Valley once or twice each month to visit their families.
Trump won Ohio by 8 points in 2016. Our election polls track currently gives him a narrow lead of just under 2 points in the state which has 18 electoral college votes.
Barack Obama will campaign with Joe Biden in the battleground state of Michigan on Saturday, just three days before election day. It will be the first joint in-person campaign appearance of the two since Biden won the Democratic presidential nomination.
There’s five days until the election, and six days until our live event discussing the results – well, to the extent that we’ll have them by then – where you can join Guardian journalists Jonathan Freedland, Kenya Evelyn, David Smith and Sarah Churchwell online to chat about it. Find out more about the 4 November event here.
I’m Martin Belam, taking over for Tom McCarthy, and I’ll be here with you for the next hours. You can ping me at martin.belam@theguardian.com.
California representative Katie Porter, she of the lethal white board, tells MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell that Donald Trump’s call for a Cinderella election – in which vote counting screeches to a halt at midnight on Tuesday and the country is left with a big orange pumpkin – is “ridiculous”.
Porter was declared the winner in an election that took nine days to count, she explains.
“President Trump here is just being ridiculous,” Porter said. “Elections are not officially decided on election night in virtually every case. There’s a process by which the secretary of state certifies the election result. On election night, I didn’t win, I didn’t lose. The votes were still being counted, and it took nine days of counting votes for me to be declared the winner...
“It was really really important to allow every validly cast vote to be counted accurately. I always remind my constituents that a slow count is a safe and secure count.”
With less than a week until Election Day, it’s important to remember that results aren’t always ready that night. It’s crucial our election officials work meticulously to make sure every American’s voice is heard. I know (from personal experience) that this may take a few days... pic.twitter.com/pEtrljmfwl
