• Americans are heading to the polls to vote for their next president. Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump each need at least 270 electoral votes to win. The battleground states of Arizona , Georgia , Michigan , Nevada , North Carolina , Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are expected to be pivotal to their path to victory.
• Harris and Trump tied with three votes each in the tiny New Hampshire community of Dixville Notch , which opened and closed its poll just after midnight ET in a decades-old tradition. Here’s an hour-by-hour guide of what to expect when state polls begin closing at 7 p.m. ET.
• The candidates held their final campaign events in battleground states last night. Harris ended her 107-day campaign in Pennsylvania spoke in Michigan — where he has ended three of his presidential campaigns.
Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump targeted Gen-Z voters as they campaigned ahead of the election, many of whom will be voting for the first time today.
Columbia University’s Columbia Magazine found that Gen Z make up more than 40 million voters, including eight million new voters.
And social media’s influence TikTok has helped inform many young people about the presidential candidates and their campaigns.
Key issues for younger voters are “climate, reproductive justice, gun violence and Biden’s incredibly unpopular support for the Israeli government,” Kohn-Murphy said.
He said that young people shared information on TikTok in a “peer-to-peer model, that really leads people to support candidates more.”
He also noted that many first-time voters did not have previous political scandals — such as former President Donald Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape — on their radar, but social media had enabled them to learn more about the candidates.
“We were somewhere between fifth grade and seventh grade when the access Hollywood tapes came out. We have gotten numb to Trump’s horrible words and actions, however these are things we have not heard and I think that TikTok has provided a way to kind of remind and shock young people.”
Trump argues he’s really running against “an evil Democrat system,” not Harris, during his final rally Former President Donald Trump argued during the final rally of his campaign that his real opponent this election was not Vice President Kamala Harris but instead “an evil Democrat system.”
“We will defeat the corrupt system in Washington. Because I’m not running against Kamala, I’m running against an evil Democrat system. These are evil people,” Trump said during his rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that started well after midnight.
“The silent majority is back and tomorrow you need to get out and vote,” Trump said.
“This has been an incredible journey. And it’s very sad in a way, because, you know, we’ve done all these, and this is the last one, but here’s the good news, all we were doing is putting ourselves in a position to win, which we can do tomorrow very easily if we show up,” he added.
It’s decision day for voters in America’s battle for the White House and control of Congress — even if the results could take days or weeks to sort through.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are hoping to win over seven swing states : Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the three Great Lakes states that make up the “blue wall” that Trump cracked in 2016 but President Joe Biden carried in 2020, and Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, the four Sun Belt battlegrounds.
While the election of either candidate would be historic, there’s much more being decided Tuesday, including five states — Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Nebraska and South Dakota — voting on whether to turn back abortion bans with constitutional amendments.
Republicans hope to take advantage of a favorable Senate map, with Democrats defending seats in the red-leaning states of Montana, Ohio and West Virginia. The party’s hopes of holding onto its narrow House majority winds from the coast of Maine through New York’s Hudson Valley, the rolling hills of Virginia’s Piedmont, a “blue dot” in Nebraska and into California’s Orange County, where the political ebbs and flows of the Trump era have been on vivid display.
The initial results in the hours after polls close might not be determinative. States decide their own election procedures, and the order in which states count early, mail-in and Election Day votes varies across the map — as does how quickly certain cities, counties and regions report their results.
Former President Donald Trump has ended his final campaign rally after speaking for nearly two hours in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
He repeated many of his campaign promises , such as vowing to impose hefty tariffs and to crack down on illegal immigration.
At one point he also brought several of his children and their spouses to the stage, who delivered brief remarks, including Tiffany, Eric and Donald Jr.
His marathon address ends a long campaign trail — with Trump saying he had attended more than 900 rallies this year.
Walz says he’s disappointed but not surprised the race is so closely contested
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said he’s disappointed the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is so closely contested.
In an interview on CBS’ “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” taped in Bucks County, Pennsylvania last Thursday, Walz laid out the contrast between the two candidates to show that the difference is “stark.”
He said of the election being so closely contested: “It disappoints me, I think, because I think that the choice is so stark, but it’s not surprising.”
“The country’s really divided. There’s been a group of people out there who figured that out, and I think they’ve done a wonderful job of making people think it doesn’t matter, everybody’s the same,” Walz said.
Walz then laid out how he saw the differences between Harris and Trump, particularly noting insults directed toward Puerto Rico made by a speaker at a Trump rally in October.
“In this case, you’ve got the Constitution versus not the Constitution. You’ve got reproductive rights versus I don’t care if you like it or not. I’ll tell you what to do, from Donald Trump in closing with insulting people. I know we’re sitting in Pennsylvania, there’s — there’s 500,000 Puerto Ricans here, and Puerto Ricans, as all Americans, are very proud of where they come from,” he said.
In the past, Walz has expressed some disbelief at the competitiveness of the presidential election. He has regularly mused at private fundraisers and campaign stops that “I’ll go to my grave not understanding” how the election is so close.
Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake says “silent majority” will back her and Trump
Arizona Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake has held her final campaign rally, telling supporters that on Tuesday they have “a chance to change the trajectory of this country and save this Republic.”
Campaigning on the steps of the Yavapai County Courthouse in Prescott, Arizona on Monday — where US Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona launched his presidential campaign — Lake, a former TV newscaster up against Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego in a key Senate race, argued that the “Make America Great Again” movement “is not dead,” and claimed that a “silent majority” will back her and former President Donald Trump tomorrow.
Lake and Gallego, a Marine veteran who represents Arizona’s 3rd congressional district, are vying for the pivotal Senate seat held by independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.
Lake, who did not concede her 2022 election loss and promoted Trump’s false theories about the 2020 election, said she believes in “fair and honest elections” and argued “I really believe that our Founding Fathers never envisioned we’d have elections that are run so horribly.”
“That’s why they never put in term limits because they figured we’d be able to vote the people that we didn’t respect out of office. And unfortunately, we haven’t been able to do that. And we’re going to change that after January. But the only way to change that is to show up in such a massive movement that we have their heads spinning,” she said, pointing to the media.
She also thanked GOP congressional candidate Abe Hamadeh and said: “When they did to us what they did to us in 2022, and everyone else ran and hid, guess who stood with me and said, damn it, we’re going to fight — Abe Hamadeh.”
She argued the election is not “Republican-Democrat anymore” but “Americanism versus communism.”
Millions of Americans will head to polling booths to cast their ballots in the US presidential election.
Voters will also elect 34 US senators (out of 100) and all 435 members for the US House of Representatives, among other posts that are up for grabs.
With the country stretching across six time zones, Election Day is a massive undertaking – and voting will begin as early as 5am EST (10:00 GMT) and go as late as 1am (06:00 GMT) on Wednesday.
-CNN.
