Candidates make final push in battleground states after Iowa poll shows Trump trailing Harris – US election live updates | US news

Donald Trump disputed an Iowa poll showing Kamala Harris ahead in red state.

The former president has passionately disputed a shock Iowa poll that found the vice-president leading Trump in the typically red state 47% to 44%.

“No President has done more for FARMERS, and the Great State of Iowa, than Donald J. Trump,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social network on Sunday morning. “In fact, it’s not even close! All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT.”

Trump continued, in all caps: “I love the farmers, and they love me. And they trust me.” More than 85% of Iowa’s land is used for farming and it produces more corn, pigs, eggs, ethanol and biodiesel than any other state.

On Saturday, the Selzer poll carried out for the Des Moines Register newspaper showed Harris ahead of her Republican rival by three points. Selzer is a widely respected polling organisation with a good record in Iowa; she shot to polling fame in 2008 when she predicted that a virtually unknown senator, Barack Obama, would beat frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses.

If Harris were even competitive in Iowa – which Trump won in both 2016 and 2020 – it could radically reshape the race.

The pollster told MSNBC on Sunday that Harris was leading in early voting in Iowa “because of her strength with women generally, even stronger with women aged 65 and older. Her margin is more than 2-to-1 – and this is an age group that shows up to vote or votes early in disproportionately large numbers.”

Earlier on Sunday, Trump’s campaign released a memo from its chief pollster and its chief data consultant calling the Des Moines Register poll “a clear outlier” and saying that an Emerson College poll – also released Saturday – more closely reflected the state of the Iowa electorate.

The Emerson poll found 53% of likely voters support Trump and 43% support Harris, with 3% undecided and 1% planning to vote for a third-party candidate.

The Trump campaign, which many Democrats believe is setting the stage for a series of legal challenges to poll results, also said in an email that the Des Moines Register poll and a subsequent New York Times swing state poll that found Harris ahead in four of the seven states, is “being used to drive a voter suppression narrative against President Trump’s supporters”.

Here’s more context on the Selzer poll:

A US government communications regulator has claimed that Vice-President Kamala Harris’s surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live violates “equal time” rules that govern political programming.

Brendan Carr, a commissioner with the federal communications commission (FCC), claimed on the social platform X that Harris’s appearance on the show “is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule”.

Carr made the claim in response to an Associated Press alert to Harris being on the show that night.

“The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct – a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election. Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns,” said Carr, who was nominated by both Trump and Biden and confirmed unanimously by the Senate three times.

FCC guidelines state: “Equal opportunities generally means providing comparable time and placement to opposing candidates; it does not require a station to provide opposing candidates with programs identical to the initiating candidate.”

A spokesperson for the FCC issued a statement: “The FCC has not made any determination regarding political programming rules, nor have we received a complaint from any interested parties.”

Harris joined comedian Maya Rudolph at the start of the show in a sketch that skewered Donald Trump for his recent rally speeches, including wearing an orange and yellow safety jacket, a riff on the ongoing garbage controversy, and pretending to fellate a broken microphone.

Harris began her “mirror image” sketch opposite Rudolph, the SNL cast member selected to impersonate her, on the other side of a mirror.

“I’m just here to remind you, you got this, because you can do something your opponent can’t do – you can open doors,” Harris told Rudolph, seemingly referring to a video from earlier in the week in which Trump had struggled to reach the handle of a garbage truck he briefly rode in to a Wisconsin rally.

Here’s more on the claim by the FCC regulator:

Donald Trump started delivering his remarks in Kinston, North Carolina, about two hours behind schedule.

So far, he’s accused his opponent Kamala Harris of doing “the worst job ever on hurricane salvage and removal” and attacked Senate GOP minority leader Mitch McConnell.

“Hopefully we get rid of Mitch McConnell pretty soon,” Trump said. “Can you believe he endorsed me? Boy, that must’ve been a painful day in his life.”

Trump says ‘I shouldn’t have left’ White House, despite losing 2020 election

Hugo Lowell

Donald Trump told supporters that he should have stayed in the White House, despite his losing the 2020 election, while at Lititz in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Saturday.

The former president’s remarks were made during one of his final rallies of the campaign, where he also denounced public polls putting him behind his rival Kamala Harris and joked that reporters could take a bullet for him.

The comments were off script – an acknowledgment of how he has become increasingly uninhibited as the fatigue of doing multiple rallies a day has inexorably taken its toll.

Trump stayed on message for some of his remarks, saying illegal immigration was down and the economy was up when he was president. His team has noted with satisfaction for weeks that they remain the top two issues for undecided voters across the battleground states.

But Trump could not resist reverting to his most problematic impulses of describing Democrats as “demonic” and then lamenting about the 2020 election, an issue that polls poorly and his team had thought they had convinced him to let it go.

“We had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” Trump said. “I shouldn’t have left, I mean honestly, we did so well, we had such a great – ” and then abruptly cut himself off.

The remark reflected what Trump told aides and allies in the aftermath of his 2020 election defeat, a loss he has never conceded, and how he sat in at least one meeting at the end of his first term where he mused about refusing to leave the White House, a person familiar with the matter said.

Once Trump started on the 2020 election, he could not stop. He revived debunked conspiracy theories from 2020 and suggested anew that voting machines would be hacked, and efforts to extend polling hours in Pennsylvania – what his own team has pushed for – amounted to fraud.

Trump also spent time at the rally lashing out at a series of recent polls, notably a Des Moines Register poll in Iowa that put him four points behind Harris in the state of Iowa. Harris is universally not expected to win Iowa, but it could be indicative of her momentum in the final days.

Here’s more context on the rally: