Summary

  • Kamala Harris's major campaign speech in Washington DC on Tuesday night risked being overshadowed by a row triggered by Joe Biden

  • Footage has emerged of the president appearing to call Donald Trump supporters "garbage". The White House say he was referring to hateful rhetoric used against Puerto Ricans, but Republicans and Trump's campaign have condemned the president

  • The comment came to light shortly after Harris told urged voters to "turn the page on the drama and the conflict" in politics

  • Earlier, at a Pennsylvania rally, Trump says Harris "doesn't have what it takes" to be president

  • With less than a week to go, polls suggest the race couldn't be closer

Watch: The Joe Biden 'garbage' comment which has angered Trump fans

Live Reporting

Edited by Sean Seddon

  1. Your Questions Answered

    How accurate is pre-election polling?

    Mike Hills
    Visual Journalism

    Line chart showing average national poll results since 24 July: Kamala Harris has a lead of 1.4 percentage points over Donald Trump in the national polling average. She was leading the national polls by 0.9 percentage points when she joined the race at the end of July. There are seven days left until the election on 5 November.

    Gabriel from Colchester asks: "I haven't seen anyone mention how big the gap was between polling and results in 2016 and 2020. Shouldn't we be expecting a Trump landslide if the polling is this close?"

    It’s true that polls underestimated support for Donald Trump in the last two presidential elections.

    Hillary Clinton did win more votes than Trump, but the state polls were less accurate and failed to pick up on his popularity in Democratic strongholds like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    In 2020, the polling error was the highest in 40 years for the national popular vote, and the highest in at least 20 years for state-level estimates, according to analysis conducted by polling experts.

    The polling miss in 2016 was put down to voters changing their minds in the final days of the campaign and because college-educated voters - who were more likely to support Clinton - had been overrepresented in polling samples.

    In 2020, the experts pointed to problems with getting Trump supporters to take part in polls, but said it was “impossible” to know exactly what had caused the polling error, especially as the election was held during a pandemic and had a record turnout.

    Pollsters have made lots of changes since then, relying less on telephone and more on online methods or combinations of online, mail and telephone, which they hope will help to include hard-to-reach voters in their samples.

    According to analysts at 538, the polling industry “had one of its most successful election cycles in US history” in the 2022 midterm elections, which could suggest pollsters have fixed some of these issues.

    But Donald Trump wasn’t on the ballot in the midterms and we won’t know until after election day whether these changes can deal with the influx of irregular voters he tends to attract.

    You can take a deeper look at national and swing state polling here.

  2. Your Questions Answered

    Will Beyoncé and Hulk Hogan impact the election?

    Anthony Zurcher
    BBC North America correspondent

    A split image with Hulk Hogan on the left side tearing open his red singlet and Beyonce on the right side standing with an arm raised while speaking in front of a podiumGetty Images

    Mick in London, UK,asks: What impact if any do these actors/rock stars have on the election?

    Back in 2016, when I was covering the Hillary Clinton presidential bid, I attended several campaign-organised concerts. Chance the Rapper and Beyoncé performed in Cleveland, and Katy Perry sang in Philadelphia.

    At the venues, Democrats handed out voter registration cards, provided polling location information and implored the crowds to get out and cast ballots for their party. Clinton ended up losing both Ohio and Pennsylvania.

    So will a Bruce Springsteen performance or a Hulk Hogan appearance move the needle in this year’s presidential race? Probably not.

    Celebrities can certainly help with fund-raising. And there is evidence that Taylor Swift, for instance, has helped drive some of her legions of fans to voter registration sites. At the very least, big names can generate interest and attention in a campaign event. Some 30,000 Texans turned out to see Harris and Beyoncé in Houston last week, even though the latter didn’t perform.

    In the end, however, it’s up to the candidate to sell themselves to the public – and give Americans a reason to vote.

  3. Your Questions Answered

    Your US election questions answered

    We've called upon a number of experts to answer some of the most asked questions - and those submitted by you - surrounding the US election.

    Starting shortly, you can expect to read more about the key issues of this election and its repercussions around the world from BBC voices such as our UK political editor Chris Mason and Russia editor Steve Rosenberg

    There will also be contributions from US-based reporters, who've been following every twist and turn of this campaign.

    At the same time, our colleagues on the BBC News Channel will be live with correspondents on the ground Anthony Zurcher and Ione Wells, answering questions sent in by you - our audience.

    They will be joined by Kathy Frankovic, consultant to YouGov America and the former Director of Surveys for CBS.

    Their YQA session will be live streamed at the top of this page - just press the Watch Live button to follow along.

  4. Harris campaign amends rally permit hours before major speech

    Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign event in PhiladelphiaGetty Images

    Kamala Harris is now expecting around 40,000 people to appear at her rally in Washington DC on Tuesday - up 20,000 people from previous estimates.

    The event is scheduled at the same location where Donald Trump told his mob of supporters to "fight like hell" in 2021 moments before they stormed US Capitol.

    Harris previously requested a permit to host a rally with up to 20,000 people in The Ellipse just in front of the White House but a revised National Park Service permit suggests her campaign estimates thousands more will attend.

    With exactly one week to the day until the election, the event has been billed by the Harris-Walz campaign as her "closing argument" speech.

  5. Trump to speak from Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida shortly

    Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in West Palm Beach, FloridaReuters

    Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in West Palm Beach, Florida

    It's not long now until Trump launches the final week of his campaign at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.

    His news conference is set to kick off at 10:00 local time (14:00 GMT) and you can follow it live by pressing Watch live at the top of the page.

    Reuters news agency says the presser will feature remarks an adviser has characterised as a rebuttal to Harris's speech. As we've been reporting, Harris is expected to deliver her “closing argument” at a rally today in Washington DC.

    We'll be filing our analysis as soon as we can, so stay with us.

  6. Your Questions Answered

    Send in your questions about the election

    As we mentioned earlier, we'll be enlisting a number of experts throughout the afternoon from 14:30 GMT to answer some of the most frequently asked election questions.

    If you've got something you'd like them to answer readers can get in touch with us in the following ways:

  7. Listen: America and... the Middle East?

    A BBC branding poster with the words The Global Story in the middle in front of a red earth. The BBC World Service logo is above it

    The spiral of violence in the Middle East – from the Hamas attacks on October 7, to the catastrophic loss of Palestinian life, to Israel’s growing fights with Hezbollah and Iran – has dominated US foreign policy and become a major issue in this year’s presidential election campaign.

    Harris and Trump both say they want to bring peace and security to the region. So how do they plan to do it?

    Sumi Somaskanda speaks to the BBC’s International Editor Jeremy Bowen in Jerusalem and the BBC’s North America Correspondent Nada Tawfik to discuss how this issue could impact the election.

  8. Arab voters split over Harris and Trump's stance on Gaza

    Sally Nabil
    BBC Arabic correspondent in Washington DC

    For many Arab American voters, the war in Gaza, and now Lebanon, has been a turning point in the US elections.

    Some voters, who usually support the Democrats, are having second thoughts about Kamala Harris. For them, she’s part of the current Biden administration, that failed to end the war in the Middle East.

    Others will go for "a protest vote". Will Asfour, a Palestinian American, has voted for Jill Stein, the Green Party Candidate.

    "Since we can’t get a ceasefire or impose an arms embargo on Israel, neither party will have my vote", says Asfour, who lives in Chicago. He tells me that dozens of his family members were killed in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza over the past year.

    The young man feels as if his tax money funds the "the killing of my people back home", as the US has been providing Israel with billions of dollars, in financial and military aid.

    On the other hand, some of the Arab votes will go for Donald Trump, the former President, who imposed the Muslim travel ban in 2017, denying entry to citizens of certain predominantly Muslim countries, including Arab countries.

    "Trump has good relations with Arab leaders, he is a man of actions, he can bring about a ceasefire", says Laila, a middle aged Iraqi American woman, who’s been in the US for 16 years.

  9. Listen: Fixing elections - for the better

    The graphic for People fixing the world. It contains a cartoon image of the globe inside a spanner.

    With so much focus on the US election and how it might play out, our colleagues in the BBC's World Service have been looking at efforts in other countries to ensure people can vote safely and securely.

    This episode of the People Fixing the World Podcast comes in a year when billions of people around the world have been eligible to take part in many different types of elections.

    In the vast but sparsely populated Northern Territory of Australia, local electoral officers travel hundreds of hours to make sure remote communities are signed up to the democratic process.

    In tech savvy Estonia, citizens have the chance to vote electronically online, with huge efforts to ensure the security of the process.

    And in Uganda, where elections have recently been marred by vote rigging and intimidation, there are initiatives to get more women involved in the process in the hope of a more fair and peaceful outcome.

  10. Melania Trump says this election is 'different' and 'dangerous'

    Melania Trump made a surprise appearance at her husband Donald Trump's rally in New York on SundayGetty Images

    Melania Trump made a surprise appearance at her husband Donald Trump's rally in New York on Sunday

    Former First Lady Melania Trump has just appeared on Fox News' flagship morning show Fox & Friends, making her second appearance on the national stage in just three days.

    Her public visibility has increased during the final stretch of the election after spending much of the campaign out of the public eye

    She made a surprise appearance on Sunday at Madison Square Garden (MSG) in New York, and introduced her husband, Donald Trump, at the campaign event which has since been thrown into the centre of controversy over an offensive comment about Puerto Rico made by a comedian.

    A Fox News anchor asks Trump about her MSG visit, to which she replies: "Sunday, through the day, was an amazing day.

    "I think that people needed to hear from me on that day... and I want to support my husband as well, so I was there for him and everybody else."

    This is her third presidential election as a potential future First Lady.

    She says she was ready for the moment on stage because she has "much more experience" and compared the energy levels now to 2016, when Donald Trump won.

    However, after the two assassination attempts on her husband's life, she does note that some things are different: "It is much more dangerous, and I'm very vigilant and very selective about where I go."

  11. BBC Verify

    What does the latest polling show?

    By Zak Datson and Robert Cuffe

    With only a week to go, the race is very tight. New polls are arriving every day, each with their own slightly different take on the figures.

    If you draw out the overall trends, rather than the individual points, you see vice-president Kamala Harris’s early lead down to about a single point.

    But the candidates share of the national vote won't decide the winner.

    Let’s turn to the battleground states, that’s the seven that were very close last time around and could be decisive in this election.

    Trump is ahead in North Carolina, Arizona, and Georgia, but only by between one and two points.

    The other battlegrounds - Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Michigan - are even tighter.

    The picture has been shifting slightly in favour of Trump since the start of October but neither candidate can bank on victory in any of these states.

    None of the leads we're seeing are bigger than the margins of error that come with all polls. So still everything to play for.

    For a full look at the latest polling data, you can check out our tracker here.

    Graphic showing the battleground states polling averages. Wisconsin is tied, Trump is <1 in Nevada and Pennsylvania. Harris is <1 in Michigan. Trump is +1 in North Carolina and +2 in Georgia and Arizona.

  12. Harris hasn't declined podcast interview, Joe Rogan says

    Joe RoganGetty Images

    Joe Rogan says Kamala Harris has not declined to be a guest on his podcast and he hopes they can "make it happen".

    This comes after he released a three-hour episode of the Joe Rogan Experience with Donald Trump on Saturday.

    Rogan - who is America's number one podcaster - says he wants to have a "nice conversation" with Harris and "get to know her as a human being".

    Harris's campaign team offered a date but asked Rogan to travel to her, he says in a post on X, adding that he wanted to do the interview at his studio in Austin, Texas.

    The podcast has a huge audience of 14.5 million Spotify followers and 17.5 million YouTube subscribers, most of whom are male.

  13. Your Questions Answered

    Send us your questions

    As we've just mentioned, we'll be enlisting a number of experts throughout this afternoon to answer some of the most asked election questions.

    If you've got something you'd like them to answer readers can get in touch with us in the following ways:

  14. Your Questions Answered

    Our experts will be weighing in on the race from 14:30

    We’ve called upon a number of experts to answer some of the most asked questions - and those submitted by you - surrounding the US election.

    You can expect to read more about the key issues of this election and its repercussions around the world from BBC voices such as our UK political editor Chris Mason and Russia editor Steve Rosenberg from 14:30 GMT.

    There will also be contributions from US-based reporters, who've been following every twist and turn of this campaign.

    At the same time, our colleagues on the BBC News Channel will be live with correspondents on the ground Anthony Zurcher and Ione Wells, answering questions sent in by you - our audience.

    They will be joined by Kathy Frankovic, consultant to YouGov America and the former Director of Surveys for CBS.

    Their YQA session will be live streamed at the top of this page - just press the Watch Live button to follow along.

  15. Former Trump White House official Steve Bannon released from prison

    Steve Bannon speaking at an annual conservative conferenceGetty Images

    Unwavering Trump ally and far-right podcaster Steve Bannon has been released from prison, after serving a four-month sentence for defying a Congressional subpoena.

    Bannon - who served as Donald Trump's chief of staff in the White House for seven months - was being kept at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut.

    A jury found him guilty in 2022 of two counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before a committee investigating the US Capitol riots on 6 January 2021, and for refusing to handover documents related to Trump's alleged effort to overturn the 2020 election results.

    Trump lost the election against Joe Biden that year and has been indicted for related election fraud.

    Shortly after Bannon's release, the New York Times reported Bannon saying: "I’m not broken, I’m empowered.

    "If people think American politics has been divisive before, you haven’t seen anything."

    Bannon is expected to hold a press conference in New York City this afternoon and return to his influential conservative daily podcast - the War Room - for its first post-jail episode.

  16. A chance to make history for the South Asian community, says Democrat voter

    Yasmin Malik
    BBC Asian Network News

    Kamala Harris is the first US presidential candidate to come from South Asian heritage, and there are hopes it can inspire the sizeable South Asian population in the country to come out and vote.

    “It’s going to be a new history that we get to talk about and experience,” Tanjina Islam tells BBC Asian Network News.

    Tanjina is a Bangladeshi American who lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and is a DNC delegate. She has previously expressed doubts because of the party’s position on the Israel-Gaza war.

    But come 5 November, she says she has no doubts about stopping another Donald Trump presidency, worried about what it could mean for Muslims like her..

    “A part of the area I live, I’d say is more conservative," she explains.

    “My mum’s experienced it, because she wears the hijab. And she’s been threatened that if Trump doesn’t get elected, they’ll come after her."

    Tanjina Islam stood in front of the US Congress

  17. Harris's candidacy could boost South Asian voter turnout

    Ritika Gupta
    Reporting from New York

    Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USReuters

    On a recent October evening on New York City’s Upper East Side, hundreds of influential Indian Americans mingled over cocktails to celebrate the Hindu festival of lights at the posh hotel The Pierre.

    But while the invitation called for a Diwali celebration, the party was buzzing with excitement over the Indian American community’s latest political milestone: Kamala Harris becoming the first US presidential candidate of South Asian heritage to lead a major party ticket.

    “You cannot be what you cannot see,” said Reshma Saujani, CEO of Girls Who Code and the first Indian American woman to run for US Congress in 2010, pointing out that so many South Asian girls see themselves in Harris.

    The challenge for Harris is to channel that enthusiasm among a booming immigrant population that’s moved beyond the traditional South Asian strongholds of California and New York to battleground states like Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

    In 2020, 71% of Indian Americans that were eligible to vote did, a 9% increase from 2016. And according to Karthick Ramakrishnan, co-founder of AAPI Data, Harris's candidacy could boost South Asian voter turnout to 75% among eligible voters.

  18. Inside Trump's push to recruit volunteers in battleground Georgia

    Kayla Epstein
    Reporting from Atlanta, Georgia

    Volunteer Dean Cottle wearing a Make America Great Again hat stood outside

    Dean Cottle knocks on doors for the Trump campaign every weekend, trying to convince less-motivated Republicans to vote

    Every weekend, Dean Cottle knocks on his fellow Georgians’ doors to persuade them to vote for Donald Trump in the US election.

    The long-time supporter of the former president is a “captain” in the Trump Force 47 programme, the campaign’s effort to turn thousands of battleground state supporters into an army of ground troops.

    Trump Force 47’s website provides a list of volunteer opportunities like phone banks, virtual training, and canvasses in each of the key battleground states.

    Dean Cottle signed up for the programme through a Facebook advert, then took a one-hour training course to become a “captain” at the local campaign office. An app directs him where to go in Fayette County, his home, then he travels “house to house, getting commitments from people”.

  19. Why was Trump in Georgia and Harris in Michigan yesterday?

    Both candidates were campaigning in key swing states yesterday, with Kamala Harris in Michigan and Donald Trump in Georgia.

    As a reminder, seven states are likely to decide who becomes the next president. These are states which experts believe could plausibly be won by either Harris or Trump.

    These are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Georgia:

    Trump at his rally in Georgia stood under a sign that says "make Georgia great again"Reuters

    President Joe Biden won the state of 11 million people, which had long been a Republican stronghold, for the Democrats by 13,000 votes in 2020.

    A third of Georgia's population is black, one of the country’s largest proportions by state.

    It is believed that black voters were instrumental in Biden flipping the state in 2020, making him the first democrat to win it since Bill Clinton in 1992.

    Michigan:

    Democratic presidential nominee U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris visits IUPAT (International Union of Painters and Allied Trades) District Council 1M in Warren Michigan. She is standing in front of a group of union workers on a factory floorReuters

    Despite backing Biden in 2020, the Great Lakes state has become symbolic of a nationwide backlash over Biden's support for Israel's war in Gaza.

    This is because Michigan has the country’s largest proportion of Arab-Americans - a demographic whose support for Biden was in jeopardy over his stance on the conflict.

    Harris has taken a harder tone on Israel, and some Gaza protesters have told the BBC they hope she will be more sympathetic to their cause. But others are still predicting her support could suffer over being associated with Biden as his vice-president.

  20. Walz is running to be US vice-president - quite literally

    Rachel Flynn
    Live reporter

    Three vertical photos of Tim Walz running in central parkTik Tok/Kate Macz

    Whether it's a high profile podcast appearance - like Trump's Joe Rogan interview - or a slightly left field TikTok, there's a focus on alternative media campaigning from both sides this election.

    We've previously reported on how the Democrats are using content creators to push the Harris campaign, with more than 200 granted exclusive access to some of the party's biggest names at the Democratic National Convention.

    Campaigning in New York last week, Tim Walz proved he's Kamala Harris' running mate in more ways than one.

    Speaking to running influencer Kate Macz while jogging a mile around Central Park, Walz said the Democrat ticket is "running hard, trying to earn your vote".

    In a TikTok published on Thursday - which received 3.7 million views in 24 hours - he spoke about his journey from Minnesota high-school teacher to VP nominee - admitting that running with Secret Service around him is "a little different".

    He talked of policy priorities, such as "protecting reproductive rights, tackling gun violence and creating an economy for the middle class".

    Some of his former students have been out campaigning for him, which he described as "the greatest thing you can have" as a former teacher.