Republican Liz Cheney has warned that JD Vance will do anything Donald Trump says, in contrast to former vice president Mike Pence. Both Mr Trump and Kamala Harris have been campaigning in key swing states today. Listen to a Sky News Daily podcast as you scroll.
Tuesday 22 October 2024 03:31, UK
That’s all for our live coverage of the US election for the night, but we’ll be back with more updates and analysis later.
If you’re just checking in, here is a recap of the key developments this evening.
Polls show the Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are basically tied in the polls with just over two weeks to go until election day (see the latest national polls here – and those from swing states here).
Earlier voting opened in eight states, and so far nearly five millions votes have been cast – or 21% of the total votes counted in the 2020 general election, according to Target Smart.
Donald Trump
The former president has spent the day in North Carolina meeting relief workers helping rebuild after the devastation of Hurricane Helene.
He told them that he can relate to their hard work and efforts because of his own campaign schedule (more here).
Mr Trump later told our US partner network NBC News that he has not seen any cheating in the election yet – but then at a rally went on to claim the Democrats were looking to cheat.
He also told a rally with faith leaders that God saved him from the assassination attempt in July to “make our country greater than ever before” (more here).
Kamala Harris
The vice president has spent the day campaigning with former congresswoman and lifelong Republican Liz Cheney, who has endorsed her for president.
She said Donald Trump “idolises tyrants” and made the case that he cannot be trusted with US national security (more here).
Liz Cheney labelled him “erratic” and “completely unstable” on foreign policy, while also explaining why she is campaigning for a Democrat for the first time (more here).
She also claimed his vice presidential pick, JD Vance, is a “particular danger to the republic” (more here).
Ms Harris also received the endorsement of another Republican – the daughter of the late Republican president Gerald Ford (more here).
JD Vance
Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate has been largely out of the public eye today, attending fundraisers in Texas.
But he was asked by reporters why he defends Mr Trump when he calls Democrats “the enemy from within”, and he replied that his boss is “unfiltered” and “speaks from the heart” (more here).
Tim Walz
Kamala Harris’s vice presidential pick has not been very visible on the campaign trail today either.
He has been at campaign events in the solid blue state of New York.
By Vaughan Hillyard, correspondent for NBC News with the Trump campaign
Since the onset of the pandemic four and a half years ago, I’d contend that I haven’t seen Trump as seemingly unencumbered or confident in his own societal standing as he publicly is portraying from the campaign stage right now – two weeks from the 2024 election.
“We need you!” multiple faithful supporters yelled out toward him at this Greenville, NC, rally as he told them about how he could comfortably be sitting on a beach right now rather than running for president again.
But after four indictments, civil findings of financial fraud, defamation and sexual abuse, a guilty verdict on 34 felony counts, and surviving an assassination attempt, Trump is exuding confidence, telling crowds that he is up in the polls in all the battleground states – but also that he will even win California.
The crowds at his events are adding fuel to his final two-week run. For the first time, the aura of Election Day feeling imminent is here.
“15 days!” Trump said as the crowd erupted. He took a pause to let its immediacy soak in.
Trump’s unencumbered dismissal of message discipline in this home stretch is paired, however, with a marked recent attention to suggest Democratic “cheating” is to come.
Despite telling NBC literally two hours earlier that he hasn’t scene any specific incidents of cheating so far, he went on a riff at a rally that Democrats are preparing to cheat, implying it’s the one obstacle in his way.
He is increasingly placing the onus on Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley to take the blame in the scenario the election were to go in Harris’s favour.
“He’s going to stop the cheating,” Trump said at the rally about Whatley in his home state.
In 2022, Trump was fighting for his relevancy by trying to prove to the country that his endorsement of candidates in GOP primaries was the key to the MAGA base.
Then, in 2023, he scoffed at a litany of other GOPers who dared to rival him for their party’s nomination.
And through 2024, he’s effectively staved off, thus far, any immediate repercussions of the criminal charges against him.
We’re watching a Donald Trump who feels validated and supported by a segment of the American population who either believes his conspiracy theories or is willing to look past his history of alleged indiscretions.
Donald Trump said at a campaign rally tonight that his daughter Tiffany, who graduated from the Georgetown University Law Center in 2020, finished first in her class.
“She was a great student, and she went to a fantastic law school, graduated number one in her class,” Mr Trump said at the event in Concord, North Carolina.
Tiffany Trump is not on a list of honours graduates for the 2020 class published on the school’s website. The Georgetown University Law Center also indicated on its website that it does not rank students.
A Trump campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There are nearly three million eligible American voters who live overseas, including many here in the UK.
But the Republican National Committee (RNC) and others filed lawsuits in the key battleground states of Michigan and North Carolina to prevent some from voting in this election.
Both cases targeted people who have never lived in the state they will be voting in, but were born overseas to parents who were residents of the state. The Michigan case also targeted the spouses of military and overseas voters.
But they were rejected by judges in both states today.
In Michigan, a judge dismissed the case because it was filed so late – less than a month before election day – and they also ruled that election language allowing those voters to cast ballots complied with both state and federal law, as well as the Michigan constitution.
In North Carolina, the Republicans claimed, without evidence, that ballots for overseas voters could part of an elaborate scheme to steal the election.
But the judge in that case found that there is “absolutely no evidence” of any such fraud occurring in North Carolina, and the Republicans had been unable to identify even a single case related to the group of voters they targeted.
A number of former national security officials who served in Donald Trump’s first administration from 2017-2021 have not come out to endorse him, and have actually stayed silent through much of this campaign.
But Liz Cheney, a Republican and former House representative for Wyoming who is campaigning with Kamala Harris, tells a campaign event that she believes many of those people will speak out publicly in the next 15 days.
She also points out that “hundreds of national security officials who served in Republican administrations” have publicly endorsed Ms Harris.
Ms Cheney goes on: “The fact [is] that vice president [Mike] Pence, who was the most loyal person there was to Donald Trump, won’t endorse him because he knows Donald Trump asked him to violate his oath of office.”
That is in reference to Mr Trump asking his then-vice president not to certify the results of the election on January 6th due to false claims of voter fraud, which he refused to do.
She says that should give voters “pause” about his new vice presidential pick, saying: “JD Vance is there because he will do what Donald Trump wants, and that makes him a particular danger to the republic as well.”
Ms Harris adds that the former officials in Trump’s first administration “who held him back, who attempted to ensure he would follow the law, are no longer there”.
“So the stakes are very high,” she adds.
Just as Donald Trump finishes speaking, Kamala Harris walks out onto the stage to address a campaign event in the key battleground state of Wisconsin.
She is joined once again by lawyer and politician Liz Cheney, a Republican and former House representative for Wyoming.
The pair is being interviewed by conservative commentator Charlie Sykes, and will then take questions from the audience.
You can watch the event live in the stream at the top of this page, at the stream below – and we’ll bring you the key lines here as they come in.
Donald Trump is speaking at a rally of faith leaders in North Carolina, and he tells them they must vote for him in this election, otherwise they will be targeted by a Kamala Harris administrations.
“You’re going to suffer greatly. They will come after Christians all over the country,” the former president says.
He claims the vice president is planning on packing the Supreme Court (appointing more justices to swing the ideological balance).
He says, without foundation, that Ms Harris is going to appoint up to 25 “Marxist radicals” in order to “rewrite the constitution and overrule your values”.
He goes on to say that his opponent will “flood our country with tens of millions more illegal aliens and make them all citizens, cancelling out your voting power forever”.
Mr Trump then turns to transgender rights, claiming Ms Harris will “mandate that every public school in America must promote the idea that children can change their genders, allow men into girls’ locker rooms, and also allow men to play in women’s sports”.
And he says she will “force doctors and parents to allow sex changes and genital mutilation of minor children”.
He calls on Christians to “stand up and save your country” by voting for him.
Donald Trump is speaking at a rally for faith leaders in North Carolina, and he discusses the assassination attempt in July.
He tells the audience that his “faith took on new meaning” that day when he was “knocked to the ground, essentially, by what seemed like a supernatural hand”.
“I would like to think that God saved me for a purpose, and that’s to make our country greater than ever before,” the former president says to cheers from the audience.
He goes on to say that his sons told him that “a bad shooter” should make the shot that his would-be assassin missed.
The attempt on his life “was a bloody sucker”, he adds.
Watch how the July shooting unfolded below…
Amid heightened security concerns and mounting staffing issues within the US Secret Service, both presidential campaigns have curtailed the frequency and kinds of events they’re holding on the trail, four sources with the campaigns have told our US partner network NBC News.
Officials with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s camps say they’ve pulled back on “off-the-record” stops – when a candidate breaks from larger-scale events to drop into a diner, ice cream shop or barber – because of more burdensome security requirements.
There’s an element of surprise to many of these stops, which is what can create local buzz about the candidate.
But since a July assassination attempt on Trump, the worlds for both candidates have drastically changed.
Each of the campaigns say Secret Service safety demands have created new challenges to booking the stops, in some cases requiring 48-hour advance notice and often far more detailed plans than they had in the past.
Planning the local stops now can be as labor-intensive for campaign staff as putting on a full event, the sources said.
On top of the time and resources required, the new demands scuttle the intent of the events, which are aimed to be more impromptu, organic visits in a community.
They also provide intimate settings for candidates to mix it up with small-business owners and potential voters.
“It takes a lot of the surprise element out of the experience,” said a Harris campaign official who, like others in this article, were granted anonymity to speak candidly.
The limitations on local stops is the new reality as both candidates race across battleground states in what polling has shown to be a contest that hangs within the margin of error.
Eric Trump is the first to address his father Donald’s final rally of the day, which is in the city of Concord in North Carolina.
This particular rally is centred around faith, and Mr Trump says his father’s campaign is “a movement of absolute love” rather than politics.
He says that during the primaries in the 2016 campaign, Republican candidate and then-governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee came up to him after a debate and said: “Eric, I’m going to drop out of this race because I feel the hand of God on your father’s shoulders.”
Mr Trump goes on to hit out at Democrats, claiming they weaponised the judiciary against his father, his supporters, and him.
“They tried to throw him off the ballots in Colorado, they tried to throw him off the ballots in Maine, they raided his home, they raided Melania’s closet, they raided Baron’s room, they censored him,” he says.
“They tried to take away his first amendment [freedom of speech rights].”
But Mr Trump adds that “in the darkest moments you could have possibly imagined, there was always a miraculous light”.
To cheers from the crowd, he declares that God belongs in every part of American life, and adds: “If Kamala Harris won’t say it, I will: we love God, and we will always be a nation of faith.”
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