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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump make last-ditch push for votes

Published

2 years ago

November 5, 2024

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump make last-ditch push for votes

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump raced across key battleground states in the final hours of campaigning in a last-ditch push for votes, as Americans prepared to head to the polls on Tuesday in one of the closest presidential elections in modern history.

The US vice-president said America was ready for a “fresh start” and claimed the momentum was with her as she held her final rally outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania, the biggest prize among the swing states that will decide the election.

“So America, it comes down to this. One more day, just one more day in the most consequential election of our lifetime. And the momentum is on our side,” Harris said.

Trump also campaigned in Pennsylvania, promising supporters in Pittsburgh a new “golden age” for the country if he were to win a second term in office.

The Republican former president later staged his final rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with a sprawling speech that ended past 2am.

“This is the last one,” he said of the event as he urged supporters to vote. “If we get out our people, it’s over, there’s nothing they can do about it . . . To make you feel a little guilty, we would only have you to blame.”

According to the Financial Times poll tracker, Harris holds a 1.5 percentage point lead over Trump nationally. But among the swing states, the vice-president has a narrow lead only in Michigan and Wisconsin, while Nevada is even and Trump has a small edge in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona.

Senior Harris campaign officials said they were on track to win a close contest and believed undecided voters were moving to their side, but they also acknowledged that it could take days to get a final result.

“We are very focused on staying calm and confident throughout this period,” Jen O’ Malley Dillon, the Harris campaign chair, told reporters on Monday afternoon.

From right, Kamala Harris with local restaurant owner Diana de La Rosa, representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and governor Josh Shapiro during a campaign stop in Reading, Pennsylvania, on Monday © Jacquelyn Martin/AP

In the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania, which has a large Puerto Rican community, Harris sought to boost her support among Latinos after a comedian at a Trump rally in New York made offensive comments about the Caribbean island and US territory last month.

“I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy . . . we are fighting for a democracy right now,” she said.

Harris was supported by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive New York member of the House of Representatives, and by rapper Fat Joe, who attended the rally and urged Latinos to support Harris. “Where is your orgullo? Where is your pride?” the rapper said.

After days of vitriolic and angry campaign rallies that focused more on his grievances against his political foes and bizarre vows to “protect” women, Trump struggled to recalibrate his message on the economy and immigration.

In Reading, Pennsylvania, Trump spoke in front of female supporters holding up pink signs that read: “Women for Trump.”

Supporters hold ‘Women for Trump’ signs behind the Republican nominee as he speaks during a rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, on Monday — Supporters hold ‘Women for Trump’ signs behind the Republican nominee as he speaks during a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday © Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

In Pittsburgh, former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, with whom Trump openly feuded a few years ago, appeared at his rally to endorse him, while Joe Rogan, the podcaster with a large male following, also announced his support.

“A vote for Trump means your groceries will be cheaper . . . your pay cheques will be higher, your streets will be safer and cleaner, your communities will be richer and your future will be brighter than ever before,” Trump told the crowd in Pittsburgh.

Trump’s efforts to project a more positive message to voters were undermined when JD Vance, his running mate, called Harris rubbish during a campaign stop in Atlanta, Georgia, earlier in the day.

“In two days, we are going to take out the trash in Washington, DC, and the trash’s name is Kamala Harris,” JD Vance said.

In Grand Rapids, Trump called Harris a “very low IQ person” and a “radical left lunatic who destroyed San Francisco”.

Meanwhile, the first results of the election were released in the tiny hamlet of Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, shortly after midnight local time, with Trump winning three votes and Harris winning three.

Some people who attended Trump’s Pittsburgh rally had travelled long distances. Renée Hughes, a retiree, flew from Sitges, Spain, to vote and attend the rally in her hometown.

“We have to get our country back,” she said. “We have become an embarrassment. Trump is a real person. He gets us, the normal people, not the elites.”

Holly Gallogly, a retired teacher from Pittsburgh, on the other hand, said: “I voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, but in the past few months I have moved to become undecided because I struggle with the hate rhetoric.”

News

Top Drug Regulator Is Fired From the F.D.A.

Published

7 hours ago

May 16, 2026

Press Room

Top Drug Regulator Is Fired From the F.D.A.

Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.

She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.

Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.

But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”

“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”

As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.

She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.

The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.

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Supreme Court is death knell for Virginia’s Democratic-friendly congressional maps

Published

10 hours ago

May 16, 2026

Press Room

Supreme Court is death knell for Virginia’s Democratic-friendly congressional maps

The U.S. Supreme Court

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

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Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to allow Virginia to use a new congressional map that favored Democrats in all but one of the state’s U.S. House seats. The map was a key part of Democrats’ effort to counter the Republican redistricting wave set off by President Trump.

The new map was drawn by Democrats and approved by Virginia voters in an April referendum. But on May 8, the Supreme Court of Virginia in a 4-to-3 vote declared the referendum, and by extension the new map, null and void because lawmakers failed to follow the proper procedures to get the issue on the ballot, violating the state constitution.

Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to put into effect the map approved by the voters, which yields four more likely Democratic congressional seats. In their emergency application, they argued the Virginia Supreme Court was “deeply mistaken” in its decision on “critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation.” Further, they asserted the decision “overrode the will of the people” by ordering Virginia to “conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected.”

Republican legislators countered that it would be improper for the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a purely state law controversy — especially since the Democrats had not raised any federal claims in the lower court.

Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Republicans without explanation leaving in place the state court ruling that voided the Democratic-friendly maps.

The court’s decision not to intervene was its latest in emergency requests for intervention on redistricting issues. In December, the high court OK’d Texas using a gerrymandered map that could help the GOP win five more seats in the U.S. House. In February, the court allowed California to use a voter-approved, Democratic-friendly map, adopted to offset Texas’s map. Then in March, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the redrawing of a New York map expected to flip a Republican congressional district Democratic.

And perhaps most importantly, in April, the high court ruled that a Louisiana congressional map was a racial gerrymander and must be redrawn. That decision immediately set off a flurry of redistricting efforts, particularly in the South, where Republican legislators immediately began redrawing congressional maps to eliminate long established majority Black and Hispanic districts.

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Explosion at Lumber Mill in Searsmont, Maine, Draws Large Emergency Response

Published

19 hours ago

May 15, 2026

Press Room

Explosion at Lumber Mill in Searsmont, Maine, Draws Large Emergency Response

An explosion and fire drew a large emergency response on Friday to a lumber mill in the Midcoast region of Maine, officials said.

The State Police and fire marshal’s investigators responded to Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, about 72 miles northeast of Portland, said Shannon Moss, a spokeswoman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.

Mike Larrivee, the director of the Waldo County Regional Communications Center, said the number of victims was unknown, cautioning that “the information we’re getting from the scene is very vague.”

“We’ve sent every resource in the county to that area, plus surrounding counties,” he said.

Footage from the scene shared by WABI-TV showed flames burning through the roof of a large structure as heavy, dark smoke billowed skyward.

The Associated Press reported that at least five people were injured, and that county officials were considering the incident a “mass casualty event.”

Catherine Robbins-Halsted, an owner and vice president at Robbins Lumber, told reporters at the scene that all of the company’s employees had been accounted for.

Gov. Janet T. Mills of Maine said on social media that she had been briefed on the situation and urged people to avoid the area.

“I ask Maine people to join me in keeping all those affected in their thoughts,” she said.

Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, said on social media that he was aware of the fire and explosion.

“As my team and I seek out more information, I am praying for the safety and well-being of first responders and everyone else on-site,” he said.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.