US election live: Trump holds rally in Atlanta after Georgia sees record first day of early voting

Trump is speaking to a large audience in Atlanta, and despite the long wait, they are clapping and cheering during the speech, which is littered with false and unsubstantiated claims, especially about immigration.

Trump claims that “starting on day one I will quickly defeat inflation … we will bring down energy costs. Liquid gold.”

“I got a lot of rich friends. They go here they go there they’re boring as hell,” Trump said.

Then Trump pivots to his misleading claim that Harris did not pass her bar exam.

From factchecking site Verify This: “Trump’s claims are misleading. Harris failed the bar exam on her first attempt, but passed on her second try.”

Trump is encouraging people to vote. “We don’t want to take a chance, we can’t lose this country,” he says.

He claims, without evidence, that the American standard of living “is in a freefall” and that “nothing works”.

He says “we’re teetering on the brink of World War Three” and lists other well-worn problems, including his claims that “illegal aliens are pouring into the country.”

But other than that we’re doing well, he says.

He promises that if he wins it will be a “golden time”. He thanks Elon Musk for giving him “the greatest endorsement”. He talks about Space X’s latest rocket test, which he says he watched while on a call with someone “who couldn’t have been that interesting”.

Trump arrives at Atlanta event 90 minutes late

Trump is now running an hour and 20 minutes late for his speech in Atlanta, Georgia.

CNN reports that the number of people who voted early in Georgia today has now risen to 300,000.

The previous record for the number of votes cast on the first day of early voting was 136,000 in 2020.

A campaign to restore abortion access in Missouri so far has raised close to $22m, the Associated Press reports, citing finance reports filed on Tuesday.

The campaign reported bringing in more than $14m between July and the end of September.

Missourians for Constitutional Freedom seeks to undo the state’s near-total abortion ban and is one of nine statewide campaigns to enshrine abortion rights into state constitutions.

The campaign had close to $11m in the bank at the beginning of the month to spend on advertising in the final weeks before the election.

Donors to the Missouri campaign include model Karlie Kloss, who gave $50,000, and the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who last month chipped in $1m. Other big funders include Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, Sixteen Thirty Fund and The Fairness Project, among others.

A Missouri political action committee opposing the abortion-rights amendment has raised about $212,000 and had less than $5,000 left at the beginning of October. The political action committee of the powerful anti-abortion group Missouri Right to Life so far has spent at least $637,000 opposing the amendment.

Initiative petition campaigns tend to cost a lot of money in Missouri, and abortion ballot measures in other states have been hugely expensive.

A 2022 fight over protecting abortion rights in Ohio cost a combined $70m, with abortion-rights supporters pitching in nearly $40m and opponents spending more than $30m. The reproductive rights amendment passed with almost 57% of the Ohio vote.

This year, abortion rights groups have out raised opponents by a nearly 8-to-1 margin in campaigns for ballot measures across the US.

CNN has an interesting story on the Harris campaign’s approach to Facebook, where, according to the CNN report, it has spent $11m to promote a page, maintained by the campaign, called The Daily Scroll.

The social media ads, which are adorned with a nondescript logo resembling a pair of checkmarks, have promoted news articles from mainstream outlets including CNN, ABC and NBC, showing easing US inflation, cheaper insulin prices, and the consequences of state abortion bans.

Overall, the Harris campaign has far outspent the Trump campaign on Meta’s platforms, spending nearly $80 million on ads since this summer, compared with about $9.4 million from Trump’s campaign and associated fundraising committees.

Unlike the Harris campaign’s main Facebook and Instagram accounts, the ads run by The Daily Scroll and Headlines 2024 aren’t soliciting donations, and most of them aren’t directing users to the campaign’s website. Instead, the Harris team is using the ads to promote select news stories from major media outlets that reflect well on the Democratic presidential nominee and poorly on Trump.

Here is more on Biden’s speech.

Biden said Kamala Harris would “cut her own path” once she wins the 2024 election, allowing for more daylight between him and his vice-president as she works to win over skeptical voters three weeks before election day.

“Kamala will take the country in her own direction, and that’s one of the most important differences in this election,” he said. “Kamala’s perspective on our problems will be fresh and new. Donald Trump’s perspective is old and failed and quite frankly, thoroughly totally dishonest.”

AP reports:

Biden’s comments may give Harris more licence to stake out her own political and policy stances in the critical closing phase of the presidential race, and appear to go further to distance the two than Harris has herself. The vice-president’s aides have privately expressed some frustration that the 81-year-old president has been too focused on his own legacy – and not the race to succeed him.

But Harris has of late faced increasing pressure to articulate how she’d govern differently from Biden, a question trickier than it seems on the surface.

While Biden’s favorability ratings remain underwater, some of the biggest pieces of his legislative agenda, from infrastructure to lowering the costs of some prescription drugs, are popular, and signaling any daylight with the president on foreign policy at a time of global crises could be seen as reckless.

Harris herself has been loathe to do anything that could be perceived as disloyal to Biden, who elevated her from a first-term senator to the vice-presidency, and then handed the reins of his political operation over to her, endorsing Harris when he dropped out of the race in July.

The US Justice Department will send election monitors to an Ohio county where a sheriff was recently accused of intimidating voters in a social media post, federal officials announced Tuesday.

AP reports that the justice department said it will monitor Portage county’s compliance with federal voting rights laws during early voting and on election day. The agency said it regularly sends staff to counties around the US to monitor compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act and other civil rights statutes related to elections and voting.

“Voters in Portage County have raised concerns about intimidation resulting from the surveillance and the collection of personal information regarding voters, as well as threats concerning the electoral process,” the justice department said in a news release.

Trump is so far running almost 40 minutes late to his rally in Atlanta.