Brandon Livesay
Reporting from New York

The US election is a marathon, but we are now approaching the final sprint. There's 31 days left.

And all eyes are on the seven swing states which will likely decide who wins this race (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin).

Donald Trump was at two of them today (Georgia and North Carolina). And Kamala Harris was in Michigan.

Both candidates are trying to get their base of supporters excited while also aiming to motivate undecided voters and possibly even convince voters on the other team to join them.

There are two big events coming up for both candidates that could help their case.

On Saturday, Trump returns to Butler - the scene of the first assassination attempt against him.

And on Monday, Harris will be featured on a special "60 Minutes" election special on national television. Trump declined to appear on the programme.

We will be covering both moments, along with all the other twists and turns of this election.

In the meantime, you can stay across the latest national polling here.

And BBC Senior North America Correspondent Gary O'Donoghue recently interviewed the wife of the man who was killed at Trump's Butler rally, which you can read about here.

We're finishing the live coverage for today. Thanks for following along.

Friday has been a busy day for US politics, so here is a quick recap what happened today:

• Donald Trump went to Georgia, where he surveyed the damage caused by Hurricane Helene alongside Georgia governor Brian Kemp. The two later appeared at a news conference, where they spoke about recovery efforts
• Later in the evening, Trump travelled to North Carolina, where he held a townhall with US military personnel and veterans
• Kamala Harris spent her day in Michigan, where she met with Arab-American leaders to speak about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, and later held a rally in Flint focused on the economy
• Back at the White House, President Joe Biden made a surprise appearance during the daily briefing with reporters, where he said he is confident the upcoming election will be "free and fair," but added that he is not sure it will be "peaceful"
• Trump's running mate, JD Vance, had his own appearance earlier in the day in Georgia, while Democratic vice-president candidate Tim Walz did not have an event scheduled today
• The US presidential race has been heating up, with only 31 days left before Election Day. So far, polling averages in battleground states suggest that the race will go down to the wire, with just one or two percentage points between the candidates

Image source, Getty Images

Donald Trump will return to Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday, nearly three months after he was targeted there by a gunman in an attempted assassination.

The shooting left Trump and two others injured and killed a rally-goer, former volunteer fire chief Corey Comperatore.

Comperatore was shot and killed after diving on members of his family to protect them as 20-year-old Thomas Crooks opened fire at the former president.

Comperatore's wife Helen told the BBC's senior North America correspondent Gary O'Donoghue, "I'm angry because there were a lot of mistakes made that day, and it didn't have to happen."

O'Donoghue was also in Butler the day of the shooting in July, where he spoke to witnesses and other bystanders. He'll be in attendance at Saturday's rally as well, to bring us updates from Trump's appearance.

The former president is expected to be joined by his running mate JD Vance and Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk, who has become a prominent supporter of Trump in recent months.

During her campaign trip, Kamala Harris has reportedly met with several leaders from Michigan's Arab community over their concerns about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

Michigan has a large Arab population whose votes could help decide who may clinch this key battleground state.

Recent polls show Donald Trump and Harris neck-and-neck among this voting group, as some Arab Americans express frustration with the Biden administration's handling of the war.

According to Harris campaign officials cited in US media, Harris "met briefly" with Arab leaders on Friday and "heard directly their perspectives on the election and the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon".

Harris reportedly discussed her efforts to end the war in Gaza, while ensuring both Israel's security, the release of the hostages held by Hamas, and a plan for Palestinians to "realise their dignity, freedom and self-determination".

She also expressed her concern about the mounting civilian casualties in Lebanon.

Donald Trump's town hall in Lafayette, North Carolina has now finished.

The city is known for being the home of Fort Liberty, a major US military base.

And nearly all the questions Trump received were from former or current US soldiers.

One active duty member asked about whether the US should build its own "Iron Dome", referencing Israel's defence system against incoming attacks on its territory, given Iran's ballistic missile attack on Israel earlier this week.

Other questions from US military personnel centred around rising costs of living, military pay rises, and diversity and inclusion training in the armed forces - which Trump has been critical of.

Trump stuck to his usual key talking points with the heavily-partisan crowd.

Mike Hills
Visual Journalist

At the moment, the polling averages in the seven states considered battlegrounds suggest the race will go down to the wire, with just one or two percentage points between the candidates.

Kamala Harris currently leads in four of the states, including Pennsylvania - albeit by less than a percentage point. Trump, meanwhile, is slightly ahead in three states.

As the chart below shows, Harris was ahead in Pennsylvania by nearly two percentage points in mid-September, but that lead is now less than one point after several polls released earlier this week suggested the race there was tightening.

We’ll be keeping a close on the polls in Pennsylvania and the other battlegrounds in the coming weeks in our poll tracker here.

Trump's town hall in Fayetteville is now underway, where he opened his remarks by promising to change the name of a nearby military base - Fort Liberty - back to Fort Bragg, which honoured a Confederate general whose family owned slaves.

Later, a US soldier stood up and asked a question. When introducing himself, he said he is based in Fort Liberty, which drew audible boos from the crowd.

"You meant Fort Bragg right?" the moderator then said, adding "It's okay guys," to the audience.

In his response to the question, Trump once again said he will change Fort Liberty's name back to Fort Bragg.

The name of the base was officially changed in 2023.

Donald Trump is now speaking at a town hall event in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Earlier today, Trump was in Georgia, where he appeared with Governor Brian Kemp and spoke about the impact of Hurricane Helene and relief efforts.

Stick with us as we bring you the latest.

Brandon Livesay
Reporting from New York

Kamala Harris has finished her rally in Flint, Michigan in what was a mixture of her regular talking points and some local issues directed at voters in a state that shapes as a major battleground in this election.

Bookending the start and end of her speech was a reminder that there are only 31 days until the election - her campaign is entering the final stretch and every day spent in a battleground state could have a significant impact at the end of this race.

Michigan is known for manufacturing, particularly the auto industry. But that industry has suffered in recent years.

Harris promised to invest by re-tooling factories, hiring locally, and creating jobs that do not require a college degree.

She told the crowd that Trump was making empty promises to the state, and claimed that his track record proves her point.

Were 200,000 manufacturing jobs lost under Trump?published at 23:21 British Summer Time 4 October

23:21 BST 4 October

By Lucy Gilder

Speaking at her first campaign event of the day in Michigan earlier on Friday, Kamala Harris criticised Donald Trump’s labour market record.

"America lost nearly 200,000 manufacturing jobs when he was president... and those losses started before the pandemic," she said.

This figure is in the right ballpark but the claim needs context.

During Trump’s time in office, 178,000 manufacturing jobs were lost, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, external, but many of these losses were as a result of the pandemic.

And more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs had been added under Trump prior to the Covid pandemic.

Under President Joe Biden, 729,000 manufacturing jobs have been added as the sector bounced back to above pre-pandemic levels of employment.

Image source, Reuters

Harris begins her remarks in Flint by highlighting that the race between her and Donald Trump "is going to be very tight until the very end".

Michigan is a key battleground state for the upcoming presidential election.

She appeals to small business owners, calling them the "backbone of America's economy", while promising that if elected, her administration would raise the start-up deduction from $5,000 to $50,000 to help entrepreneurs start their small business.

Harris also mentions housing unaffordability, which she says is because of "a serious housing shortage." On this, she outlines a policy promise to build three million new homes and provide assistance for first-time home buyers.

She stays on the economic theme, outlining Friday's "solid jobs report", which showed that 250,000 jobs were created in the last month.

"But there's still more we need to do," Harris says, touching on the high cost of groceries. She then outlines her promise of taking on what she says is corporate price gouging if she is elected.

Kamala Harris is about to take the stage for her second campaign event in Michigan today.

She is speaking at a rally in Flint.

Stick with us, we'll bring you the key updates.

Madeline Halpert
US reporter

Image source, Getty Images

As we mentioned earlier, Kamala Harris appeared in Detroit, Michigan, on Friday. She's also holding another rally in the state, in Flint, where she is due to take the stage shortly.

This presidential election cycle, both Harris and Donald Trump are visiting Flint, a union town in mid-Michigan that has faced economic downturns over the years as the auto industry in the area suffered.

The city also made national headlines for its water crisis in 2014, after city officials changed the drinking water source, leading to lead contamination.

Flint is the biggest city in the politically diverse Genesee County, which Joe Biden won with 54% of the vote in 2020, after Hillary Clinton won the county by a smaller margin in 2016.

Harris's visit to the area suggests she's not taking the region's support for granted. It comes after she's struggled to win support from national union groups, which predominately backed Biden in 2020.

Ana Faguy
US reporter

Image source, Getty Images

Earlier on Friday, I listened in to a call organised by the National Task Force on Election Crises to discuss the impacts of Hurricane Helene on voting in the upcoming election, particularly in the important swing state of North Carolina.

Several voting sites in North Carolina no longer exist because of the storm, said Anne Tindall, special counsel at the non-partisan organisation Protect Democracy, which runs the task force.

She noted several sites are severely damaged and that it will be necessary to designate new sites and combine some sites to ensure voters have access to polling places.

Experts on the call agreed that regardless of what happens with the voting sites, the storm will impact turnout in the election next month.

As residents deal with damaged homes and gutted infrastructure, there will be a diminished number of votes "to some degree or another" in the counties affected by the storm, according to Robert Orr, a former North Carolina Supreme Court justice.

Separately, a judge in South Carolina has ruled that voters in the state can have an additional 10 days to register ahead of the 5 November poll, according to local media, as residents there are also dealing with damage from Helene. The deadline has been extended to 14 October.

Biden's briefing room appearance was a shock for the press corpspublished at 21:50 British Summer Time 4 October

21:50 BST 4 October

Courtney Subramanian
Reporting from Washington DC

My colleagues told you a earlier about Joe Biden's surprise appearance in the White House briefing room on Friday afternoon.

Over the last four years, reporters have clamoured for the president to come to the podium and take questions on news of the day.

His staff have long rebuffed those requests by pointing to his exchanges with reporters when leaving the White House, or at the beginning of an event in the Oval Office. But those moments are brief, allowing the president to avoid follow-up questions. Instead, it is usually press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and other officials who speak at the daily briefing.

Biden's appearance came as a shock to many in the press corps, and as a former White House correspondent, I can confidently say it was a first for a president who has largely restricted media access. His absence from the briefing room is a stark contrast with former President Donald Trump, who effectively took over briefings as the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded in 2020.

Biden, who served in the US Senate for 36 years and regularly sparred with reporters before he was president, clearly enjoyed the back-and-forth in the briefing room. He answered questions on issues including the Middle East conflict and the election. He even joked he was jumping back into the 2024 presidential race, which you can see in the video below.

The one question that went unasked - and unanswered - is why he chose today to finally make his debut briefing room appearance, and why he hasn't done it sooner.

Image source, Reuters

Earlier, Vice-President Kamala Harris held a campaign speech at a firehouse in Detroit, Michigan.

It comes after the International Association of Firefighters union announced yesterday it would not endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. The union endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

In today's speech, Harris spoke to the room of firefighters and union workers about “the power of collective bargaining”.

She referenced the International Longshoremen’s Association, which represents dockworkers. They recently reached a tentative agreement on wages following a strike that started earlier this week.

“When unions are strong, Americans are strong,” she said.

Harris also spoke out against her political opponent Donald Trump, calling his track record for working people a "disaster".

She said he is making "the same empty promises to the people of Michigan... hoping you will forget how he let you down".

Image source, Reuters

Donald Trump just spoke a little while ago in Evans, Georgia, after he visited areas hit by the devastating Hurricane Helene. He appeared along with Georgia's governor Brian Kemp.

Trump said his heart breaks for the people who died as a result of Helene, including a 27-year-old mother and her two babies from Georgia.

Trump also praised billionaire Elon Musk for providing Starlink internet for affected states, and said he thanked him personally. Musk has actively supported Trump during this presidential campaign.

On the upcoming election, Trump appealed to Georgians by saying that their state will “get the best treatment” should he win.

Trump also addressed his relationship with Governor Kemp, whom he had recently called a "bad guy" and "disloyal" during a rally in August.

"It's great," he told a reporter. "We always work together very well."

He later criticised the Biden administration's Helene response, calling it "terrible".

The former president is in Georgia with Governor Brian Kemp. The state was impacted by Hurricane Helene, and Trump is expected to speak about the recovery efforts.

Stick with us, we will bring you updates from press conference.

Vance makes misleading claim about illegal migrant criminalspublished at 20:14 British Summer Time 4 October

20:14 BST 4 October

By Lucy Gilder

At a rally in Georgia earlier, JD Vance criticised Kamala Harris’s record on immigration.

He said: “Under Kamala Harris’s leadership... 425,000 illegal migrant criminals are in the United States of America.”

This is misleading.

The figure comes from newly-released data from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

It said that, as of July 2024, there were 425,431 non-citizens with criminal convictions on its database of people facing deportation proceedings, but who were not held in ICE custody.

However, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said: "The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more" – so some will have arrived during previous administrations, including Donald Trump’s.

• Read more: Migrants with criminal records - what new US data shows

A little earlier we started bringing you some details from JD Vance's rally in Georgia – before we spotted Joe Biden attending his first White House daily briefing in four years and pivoting to that.

Let’s return to that rally, and some answers Vance gave to reporters:

• He continued to attack Kamala Harris - criticising her record as vice-president and handling of the US-Mexico border, where there have been record crossings during the Biden presidency
• Vance also referenced his vice-presidential debate this week with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, saying his strategy to hit out strong at Harris came from advice from Donald Trump
• When asked if he would use the word "rigged" to describe the 2020 presidential election - a phrase sometimes used by Republicans despite there being no evidence of election fraud - he said: "We're focused on the future in this election and in this campaign”

Biden also mentioned the vice-presidential debate during his remarks a few minutes ago, "I noticed that the vice-presidential Republican candidate did not say he would accept the outcome of the election. They haven't even accepted the outcome of the last election," he said.