Image source, Reuters

Kamala Harris is unlikely to meet with Sir Keir Starmer ahead of election day in the US, Downing Street says.

Starmer met with Donald Trump when he was in New York in September, when the UK prime minister was in the country for the UN General Assembly.

At the time, Starmer said it would be "very good" to meet both presidential candidates before Americans go to the polls on 5 November.

But with Starmer currently in Samoa for a Commonwealth summit, and election day only 12 days away in the US, it's been accepted that time is running out for that meeting to happen, No 10 says.

Image source, Getty Images

Here's what to expect from the presidential hopefuls and their running partners today.

For the first time on this campaign trail, former US President Barack Obama will appear alongside Kamala Harris at a rally in Clarkston, Georgia this afternoon. And he's not the only guest - Bruce Springsteen is set to join them on stage.

Donald Trump is holding a rally at Arizona State University's Mullett Arena this evening. Later, he'll be in Las Vegas speaking at a rally held by Turning Point - a conservative group advocating for conservative politics in education.

Harris's VP pick Tim Walz will travel to Greenville and Wilmington in North Carolina, while Trump's running mate JD Vance will campaign in Waterford, Michigan followed by a town hall event in Detroit.

Our US reporters will be in Arizona, Georgia and Las Vegas to tell us all about it.

Rachel Looker

Julie Smiley lives in New Hampshire and is originally from Wolverhampton in the UK. She became a US citizen in the early 2000s and supports Kamala Harris.

One of the things that is of huge concern to someone who wasn't raised in the US is the spending on political campaigns. In the UK, there are regulations limiting spending. There's so much more that could be done with that money.

The localisation of decision-making also concerns me. While I can understand to some extent the rationale behind having decisions made locally, when you get down to the school-board level, I would prefer to see educated professionals making some of the more impactful decisions.

The electoral college really surprised me as to how that works and that each person's vote is not of equal value. I think we need to overturn that.

In the lead-up to election day, BBC Voter Voices is hearing from Americans around the country about what matters to them. Are you an American voter? Want to join in? Apply to be featured in future BBC stories here.

Mike Hills
Visual Journalism team

At the moment, the polling averages in the seven swing states suggest the race will go down to the wire.

There is currently less than one percentage point separating the candidates in Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Trump is ahead by two points in Arizona and Georgia.

In Pennsylvania, Trump has edged in front by 0.2 points according to the latest state-level polling averages. While a lead that small is well within the margin of error and means the state is essentially tied, we’ll be looking to see if it grows over the next few days.

As always, you can follow the state of the race in the swing states using our poll tracker.

Throughout the race, critics and pundits have said Kamala Harris has a habit for giving "word salad" answers - jumbled responses to questions which take a while to get to the point.

Speaking after CNN's town hall event on Wednesday, former President Barack Obama's right-hand man David Axelrod echoed this, saying the Democratic nominee has a habit of going to "word salad city".

He pointed to her answer on Israel in particular, which led to an answer spanning several minutes long.

During the debate, Harris was asked what she thought her weaknesses as a candidate were - and it appeared she had heard the criticism.

She said she "may not be quick to have an answer as soon as you ask", adding that "some might call that a weakness... but that's how I work".

Image source, Getty Images

The Republican candidate's oldest son was out and about on the campaign trail on Wednesday.

He was pictured at Tombstone Tactical, a gun store in the swing state of Arizona.

Gun ownership is highly politicised in the US. Earlier in the campaign, Kamala Harris said she owns a gun in what was seen by some as an effort to win support among a group Republicans have traditionally attracted support from.

Image source, Getty Images

Anthony Zurcher
BBC North America correspondent

Image source, Reuters

On Wednesday afternoon, Kamala Harris stood in front of the vice-presidential residence in Washington DC, and delivered a short but withering attack on her Republican presidential opponent.

Calling Donald Trump “increasingly unhinged and unstable,” she cited critical comments made by John Kelly, Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff, in a New York Times interview.

The vice-president quoted Kelly describing Trump as someone who “certainly falls into the general definition of fascists” and who had spoken approvingly of Hitler several times.

In the home stretch of political campaigns - particularly one as tight and hard-fought as the 2024 presidential race - there is a natural tendency for candidates to turn negative. Attacks tend to be more effective in motivating supporters to head to the polls and disrupting the opposing campaigns.

• Read more about how the Harris campaign's “joyful” messaging has changed here

Around 26.5 million people across the US have already voted, according to the University of Florida Election Lab early voter tracker.

That includes 1.9 million people in Georgia, 1.1 million people in Michigan, 1.7 million people in North Carolina and 1.1 million people in Pennsylvania - all of them swing states which could decide the election.

More than 63 million people across the US have requested mail-in ballots and 15 million people have returned them, according to the tracker.

Terrorism charges have been filed against a man accused of committing three shooting attacks targeting the Democratic National Committee's offices in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona.

Jeffrey Michael Kelly, 60, faces multiple other charges, including criminal damage and unlawful discharge of a firearm.

Nobody was inside the offices at the times of the shootings, which occurred over several weeks, and nobody was injured. The office has now been closed down.

Kelly is also accused of putting up signs allegedly affixed with razor blades, and others had bags of "white powdery substance" attached that were labelled ”biohazard”, McCoy said.

"Let me be clear: Justice does not have a political party," Tempe Police Chief Kenneth McCoy said in a news conference on Wednesday.

Police say Kelly was found with a machine gun in his vehicle when he was arrested. An FBI search of his home uncovered 120 guns, a grenade launcher, body armour, 250,000 bullets, as well as numerous other gun accessories.

Officials say he may have been planning a mass attack. His arrest comes as officials ramp up security measures ahead of election day.

Image source, EPA

It is 07:00 in London and 02:00 in Washington DC. If you're just joining us, here are your essential US presidential election updates:

• Kamala Harris says she believes Donald Trump is a "fascist" and wants "unchecked power" in a potential second term
• Trump responds by saying his opponent has a "warped mind" and calls her a "threat to democracy"
• It comes after John Kelly, Trump's longest-serving White House chief of staff, said Trump had "fascist" tendencies and alleged he said Hitler had done "some good things"
• Elsewhere, Trump calls Harris a "tax queen" at a rally in Georgia. Harris repeats her pledge not to raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000 (£305,000) a year

• The Justice Department warns Elon Musk's pro-Trump cash giveaway to voters in swing states may be illegal

Stay tuned throughout the day as we continue to bring you the latest updates and analysis.

Christal Hayes
Reporting from Arizona

Earlier, I went on a tour of the centre where ballots will be processed in Maricopa County, Arizona. The typically mundane process has become a key point of contention in US elections since 2020.

Protesters got into this building after Trump supporters wrongfully claimed officials here had rigged the last presidential election.

A number of security measures have been added to protect workers and the ballots - including two layers of barriers, metal detectors, armed security guards and cameras.

Officials showed us two large rooms, where bipartisan groups of workers were already at work counting mail-in ballots.

In one room, groups of two - each person from a different political party - sat at large, vertical screens examining ballots with errors. In another, groups vetted ballots for damage.

Coloured lanyards separate these workers by party and cameras watch them 24/7.

Cai Pigliucci
Reporting from Georgia

The office of Georgia's secretary of state confirms it thwarted a cyber attack earlier this month which attempted to crash the website voters use to request absentee ballots.

Voting is already under way in the key battleground state. Georgia could decide who enters the White House, which makes it a more likely target for attempted manipulation.

Thousands of attempts were made from around the world to crash the site. Though it's unclear who was behind the attack, it could have originated from overseas, officials said.

Georgia was at the centre of Trump's unfounded allegations of voter fraud in 2020 after he very narrowly lost the state, leading to protests there.

In January 2021, Trump was recorded on a phone call asking Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" 11,780 votes - the number he would have required to beat Biden in that state.

Trump was later charged with conspiracy to overturn the state's election results, which he denies.

Mike Wendling
US digital reporter

The Washington Post has reported, external that an American living in Moscow has allegedly been funded by Russian intelligence to circulate stories targeting Kamala Harris’s campaign, citing documents from European officials.

The BBC has not independently verified the documents or the payments.

Earlier this year we reported on the activities of the man at the centre of the allegations, John Mark Dougan.

Dougan has created a network of online news sites filled mostly with stories written by AI - but the network also carries completely invented stories, backed by evidence such as fake videos, designed to undermine Ukraine and US foreign policy.

Occasionally – like in the case of a fake story about a sports car purchased by Ukraine's first lady – they go viral.

Stories that originated in the Dougan network – including another false tale about yachts allegedly bought with US aid money – have been repeated by US lawmakers including JD Vance, the Ohio senator who’s Donald Trump’s vice-presidential nominee.

The Post says Dougan's operation, a former Florida sheriff’s deputy who fled to Russia after facing an investigation, is connected to the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence arm. I've contacted Dougan for comment.

Image source, Getty Images

Stacey Williams, a former model, has alleged in an interview with the Guardian newspaper that she was groped by Donald Trump in 1993, a few months after she said she was introduced to him by the late Jeffrey Epstein.

The allegations, which were also made on a call organised by a group supporting Kamala Harris, were vehemently denied by the Trump campaign.

Williams said she had briefly dated Epstein and while the pair were on a walk in New York in 1993, they stopped by at Trump Tower at Epstein’s suggestion. Williams alleged that when Trump greeted her, he pulled her towards him and started groping her, which caused her to freeze in shock.

She said she believed she saw the two men smile at each other as it happened. Epstein killed himself in 2019 while awaiting trial over federal sex-trafficking charges.

A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign called the allegations by Williams "unequivocally false".

"Fake allegations like this are a disservice to women who are truly victims of assault, like the women in Doug Emhoff's past," the campaign statement said.

The Trump campaign and allies have seized on news reports about Democratic nominee Kamala Harris's husband Doug Emhoff, including that he had an extramarital affair during his first marriage.

Emhoff has admitted the affair, saying he and his first wife went "through some tough times on account of my actions”.

A spokesperson for Emhoff has separately denied a Daily Mail report that the vice-president’s husband once slapped a former girlfriend in public. They told Semafor it was "untrue” and that “any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false".

Image source, Getty Images

Kamala Harris's assessment of Donald Trump as a "fascist" does not come out of nowhere.

John Kelly, who served as Trump's White House chief of staff, accused his former boss of being a "fascist" earlier this week.

In an interview with the New York Times, Kelly said Trump met the "general definition of a fascist" and "commented more than once that Hitler did some good things too".

Kelly first joined the Trump administration as homeland security secretary, before moving to the White House in 2017.

General Mark Milley, who served under Trump as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has previously made similar accusations, calling Trump "fascist to the core".

“We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, to a tyrant or dictator or wannabe dictator," he said in an interview.

Milley added: "No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump."

Image source, EPA

Earlier, we reported that Kamala Harris said she believed her opponent is a "fascist" and wants "unchecked power" during a television appearance.

She replied "I do" when asked if she agreed with Trump's former aide that he is a fascist during the CNN event.

Now Trump has responded on his Truth Social platform, writing: "She is increasingly raising her rhetoric, going so far as to call me Adolf Hitler, and anything else that comes to her warped mind."

Trump referred to Harris as "Comrade Kamala Harris" - a reference to what he says are her far-left policies - and described her as a "threat to democracy".

Here are the key takeaways from Kamala Harris's CNN town hall in Pennsylvania

• The vice-president says she agrees with Trump's former top aide John Kelly, who described the former president as "fascist"

• She said Congress must pass a law to legalise abortion nationwide, and that the Congressional filibuster - which has been used to frustrate efforts - may need to be reformed
• Harris said she believes in equality between Israel and Palestinians, and that both groups have a right to their own country
• She also denounced antisemitism in the US, saying that more laws must be put in place to add a "deterrent" against hate crimes
• Harris said she plans to cut taxes for 100 million middle class Americans by increasing taxes on billionaires

Image source, Getty Images

Trump wrapped up his speech a short while ago in Duluth, a city in the Atlanta metro area of Georgia.

In his remarks he criticised Joe Biden for calling on voters to "lock him up", and lashed out at Harris's running mate Tim Walz, who he called "a sick guy".

He also referenced 100-year old former Democratic president Jimmy Carter, telling voters: "I think he voted for me."

After telling a voter that her greatest weakness is that she's "kind of a nerd sometimes" Harris fields a question from a voter about her tax policy.

Harris says billionaires have a lower tax rate than teachers and firefighters. The voter interrupts to say she wants to know about "hard workers" who "pound the street [and] have some success" - not billionaires.

Harris says that billionaires are an important part of her plan because Trump cut their taxes, which she contrasts with her plan for a tax cut for the middle class, which she says will affect around 100 million people.

She reiterates her pledge not to increase taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year, adding that "we do need to take seriously a system that benefits the richest and does not help out working middle class Americans".

She adds: "I come from the middle class, and I believe that the middle class needs tax breaks to not just get by, but to get ahead."