Donald Trump tried to reset his campaign at a rally in battleground Pennsylvania on Saturday as polls show Kamala Harris pulling ahead in key swing states.

But the former president quickly broke away from the prepared speech about economic issues to launch personal attacks on Harris including accusations that her agenda is both communist and fascist, and that she has “the laugh of a crazy person”.

Trump’s written speech before a mostly filled 8,000-seat indoor arena in Wilkes-Barre focussed on economic policy. Some Republican strategists had hoped the former president could regain the initiative by zeroing in on issues on which opinion polls say voters have greater trust in Trump than the Democrats, such as inflation.

Trump attacked Harris as part of the Biden administration for the surge in prices that has hit many Americans hard and described increased household costs as “the Kamala Harris inflation tax”.

“She was there for everything,” he said in attempting to pin Biden’s policies on her.

Trump also likened Harris’s pledge on Friday to tackle high grocery costs by targeting profiteering by food corporations, and to bring down housing and prescription drug costs, to the Soviet Union’s economic system.

“In her speech yesterday, Kamala went full communist,” he said. “Comrade Kamala announced that she wants to institute socialist price controls. You saw that never worked before … It will cause rationing, hunger and skyrocketing prices.”

The former president challenged voters to ask themselves whether they were “better off with Kamala and Biden than you were under President Donald J Trump”, a question that many in Pennsylvania might answer in his favour.

But the impact was soon lost as Trump once again veered repeatedly away from the script with rambling discourses from immigration to China and trans people, often based on outright falsehoods.

At one point, he even acknowledged that was what he was doing.

“They’ll say he was rambling. I don’t ramble. I’m a really smart guy, you know, really smart. I don’t ramble. But the other day, anytime I hit too hard, they say he was rambling, rambling,” he said.

The audience, some wearing T-shirts proclaiming “I’m voting for a convicted felon” and chanting “Fight, fight, fight” in reference to the former president’s words shortly after he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt last month, urged Trump on.

When he returned to the script, Trump attacked Harris for her previous opposition to fracking, an unpopular stance in Pennsylvania, which is a major fracker, but he will not have helped himself in the Rust belt by saying he would cut spending on infrastructure such as renewing bridges and roads, which has provided jobs in the region.

Trump also challenged Harris’s legitimacy as the Democratic presidential candidate, describing it as “a coup” against Biden.

“Joe Biden hates her. This was an overthrow of a president,” he said.

Trump confused some in the audience with what appeared to be a claim that if Harris could become the candidate without a primary election, then so should he because he is so popular among Republicans.

“I said, so why are we having an election? They didn’t have an election. Why are we having an election?” he said.

Trump described Harris’s decision to pass over Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, as her running mate, as antisemitism in an apparent reference to debate about whether Shapiro’s support for Israel, including work for the Israel embassy in the past, would damage the Democratic campaign because of the war in Gaza .

“They turned him down because he’s Jewish. That’s why they turned him down. Now, we can be politically correct and not say that. I could say, well, they turned him down for various reasons. No, no, they turned him down because he’s Jewish,” said Trump.

“And I’ll tell you this, any Jewish person that votes for her or a Democrat has to go out and have their head examined.”

Through it all, Trump repeatedly returned to personal attacks on Harris, including a bizarre discourse on how she laughs, a mannerism that has proven popular among many younger voters in particular.

“Have you heard her laugh? That is the laugh of a crazy person. That is the laugh of a crazy, the laugh of a lunatic,” he said.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Sir Keir Starmer’s government has been urged to follow the US and EU in banning aviation fuel containing lead that is used by small planes across the UK.

MPs and researchers told the Financial Times that ministers should act to phase out production and use of tetraethyl lead (TEL), a compound in aviation gasoline that powers thousands of light, piston-engine aircraft.

Leaded petrol was banned in 1999 because of its effect on human health by the then Labour government, but TEL continues to be made in Britain.

Lead is a toxic metal that impairs the mental development of children and has a devastating impact on almost every organ in the human body. Any level of exposure is capable of having a harmful effect, according to the World Health Organization.

The UK is the only country in the world where TEL is still made. Most advanced economies had banned production of the compound by the early 2000s.

The EU has pledged to ban imports of TEL as of May 1 2025, while in the US the Eliminate Aviation Gasoline Lead Emissions initiative, a public-private partnership between the government, the oil industry and the aviation sector, has a target of 2030 for the complete phaseout of leaded Avgas.

A study by researchers at the University of Kent in 2022 found most piston engine aircraft in the UK used leaded aviation fuel and that there were “370,632 residences within 4km of a general aviation airport at risk from exposure to lead emissions”.

Leaded aviation fuel (AVGAS100LL) contains 0.56 grammes of tetraethyl lead per litre, which is expelled from the engine during an aircraft’s flight.

Ashley Mills, a public health data scientist who led the University of Kent study, said planes using this fuel distributed the toxic metal into the air and soil around airports and called for the UK to phase out leaded Avgas by 2030.

“The lack of adoption [of lead-free fuel] is due to unavailability and pilot perceptions around suitability,” Mills said, citing GAMI’s G100UL, a high-octane lead-free fuel certified by the Federal Aviation Administration, the US aviation regulator. “The main barrier here is political will.”

Lee Crawfurd, research fellow at the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank in Washington DC, said it was “shocking . . . that it’s OK for people to pump out neurotoxins into the air above children’s homes and schools for the sake of a hobby”.

“Banning leaded aviation fuel would be really easy. There can’t be very many better value things we could do for public health, education, and productivity.”

A recommendation to ban the use of TEL in aviation fuels would be made by the UK Health and Safety Executive, the watchdog for work-related safety, under its Reach (registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemicals) regulation. 

Reach reassessed aviation fluids this year and decided not to recommend curbing the use of TEL. HSE officials said ultimately it was for a minister to make a decision on regulatory action.

They added that strict airworthiness requirements for these aircraft meant alternative fuels would need to undergo extensive testing in order to demonstrate they would be suitable and not lead to catastrophic engine failures.

Siân Berry, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion and a long-term clean air campaigner, said the continued use of lead based fuels was “really worrying as the impact . . . will be concentrated in certain areas”.

“We need to look at all aspects of cleaning up hazards in our air . . . [and] we need to make sure we are not behind the rest of the world in phasing this out,” she added.

Wera Hobhouse, Liberal Democrat MP and the party’s transport spokesperson, said: “Ministers should be looking to legislate to bring an end to the use of leaded fuel on small aircraft. Both the EU and America have already taken these steps and the UK should follow that to minimise any risk it could have to the health of our nation.”

Mills at Kent university said that, from April 2025, the government “should differentiate fuel duty on leaded and unleaded Avgas to incentivise unleaded-capable pilots to switch”. 

Duty on Avgas — which has stood at 38p per litre since January 2021 — should rise every year until 2030, when it should be illegal to sell the leaded fuel in the UK, he added. The Treasury was contacted for comment.

Johann Beckford, senior policy adviser at the Green Alliance, a think-tank, said it was “important to remain in line with the EU and US in terms of the regulations we follow”.

“The time has come for a ban on lead in aviation fuel to support children’s health,” he added. “In the longer term, government needs to support the development of zero emission flight alternatives to cut emissions.”

The Department for Transport said it was “committed to making flying cleaner” and that there were “not enough widely available alternatives to leaded fuels which can be used by all general aviation aircraft”. 

“We are working closely with the industry and the UK Health and Safety Executive to move towards lead-free alternatives as quickly as possible,” it added.

The mantra “past performance is no guarantee of future results” applies to many things, including trying to predict election results ahead of time. But how many voters in a deep blue state showed up in this month’s primary – and how they voted – may provide insight into the political environment in November.

Election data analysts point to Washington state’s primary results as a useful barometer of which party is likely to win the national popular vote for the House of Representatives and to what degree.

Here’s how to do it: add up the total votes for Democrats and Republicans in Washington’s 10 House district primaries. Then, take the difference between them and subtract 12 to get a rough estimate of the predicted House margin in November.

An NPR analysis of the Washington primary using this framework estimates that Democrats could win the national popular vote by about 4 points, which is slightly more than the 2020 presidential election that saw them narrowly win the White House and control of both chambers of Congress.

In other words, it will likely be yet another close race.

This year, Democrats won about 57.3% of the Congressional primary vote to Republicans’ 41.3%, or a margin of 16%. Subtract 12 percentage points, and you get that estimate of a 4% popular vote victory for Democrats later this year.

Current presidential polling averages have Vice President Harris leading former President Donald Trump by about 3% heading into the Democratic National Convention, and the most recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll also found Harris up by 3%, suggesting a similar national environment could be waiting in November.

In recent elections, the framework has also hinted at the direction of public sentiment ahead of the general elections, like the 2022 midterms. Democrats finished with a 10.4% margin in Washington’s primary election, a down year that suggested Republicans were favored by about 1.6%, closer to the final national popular vote advantage of about 2.8% for the GOP in the House.

In 2020, a 14% primary margin suggested a 2% popular vote victory for Democrats, which ended up being closer to 3%. 2018’s “blue wave” that saw Democrats win the House popular vote with a roughly 8.5% margin was foreshadowed by Washington’s primary that saw a 20.4 % Democratic margin across its Congressional seats.

Why Washington state?

J. Miles Coleman, Associate Editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at University of Virginia Center for Politics, says Washington’s predictive power is driven by a few unique factors.

“One, the primary is open to all voters, and two, it occurs relatively late in the primary season,” he said. “Down-ballot primaries in other states usually begin in March, so it almost has a feel of being a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the fall election.”

Unlike many other primaries, Washington’s election sees all candidates from all parties on the same ballot, with the top two vote-getters proceeding to the general election. There are often more candidates and more ideological options for voters to express their preferences under the umbrella of the two major parties.

“This, combined with the very high turnout we see in this election – not quite at the level of a general election, but far better than most primaries – makes it much more representative,” Lakshya Jain, CEO of the elections modeling website Split Ticket, said. “It’s also a state that’s roughly as white as the nation is and just a few points more educated, meaning that it’s at least somewhat representative of the overall electorate.”

Jain said the Washington primary indicates an election cycle that is definitely driven by Democratic enthusiasm, but not to the degree of “blue wave” election years like 2018.

“The fact that Democrats are substantially outperforming their 2022 numbers bodes very well for them, especially given that they almost kept the House that year,” he added. “I will say that basically everything that’s been going on of late seems good for them — polling has surged in their direction, and the primary results and specials broadly all seem good for them.”

That said, the Washington primary shorthand should not be used as absolute gospel to be applied equally because there are 435 House races, 33 Senate races and 50 state-level presidential elections that all have their own quirks and local electorates that change how useful the estimate may be.

There are only a small handful of competitive House, Senate and presidential battlegrounds, so increased Democratic turnout and enthusiasm in noncompetitive races could lead to a higher national popular vote victory without winning those races, for example.

Coleman added that a third presidential election cycle that has been dominated by Trump means low-propensity voters that support him and no other candidate are another group to watch for as well.

“While there are some promising signs for Democrats, the Washington primary being one of them, to me, one X-factor lingering over the election is the question of how many of those voters Trump will bring out.”