Trump holds town hall event in North Carolina as Harris campaigns in Michigan – as it happened

Wrapping up our US politics new coverage for today, though our Middle East crisis news updates will continue. Here’s our updated key news of the day:

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  Kamala Harris campaigned in Michigan, focusing on her support from organized labor and pledging to support and protect “good union jobs.” In Detroit, Harris called Trump a “union buster” while praising collective bargaining for its benefits to workers. Later, in Flint, Magic Johnson appeared to endorse her and urge Black men to vote for Harris.

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  Meanwhile, Donald Trump held campaign events in Georgia, where he appeared with Brian Kemp, the state’s Republican governor, who has been the target of Trump’s ire since Kemp refused to overturn the state’s 2020 election results in Trump’s favor, and then in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home to a major army base.

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  Polls show the presidential race is tightening in North Carolina, a swing state Trump won in 2016 and 2020, leaving some Trump supporters concerned.

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  Biden popped into the White House press briefing today. When asked about the November election, he said he was “confident it will be free and fair. I don’t know whether it will be peaceful,” given Trump’s rhetoric.

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  Biden also debunked claims from Marco Rubio that the positive jobs report was fake, saying “anything that Maga Republicans don’t like they call fake.” The September jobs report was unexpectedly strong, defying fears of an economic slowdown. The country added 254,000 jobs last month.

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  JD Vance spoke in Georgia this afternoon, telling undocumented immigrants “you’ve got four months, pack your bags, because you’re going home.” He also dodged a reporter’s question on whether the 2020 election was “rigged.”

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  Trump announced that his return to Butler, Pennsylvania, tomorrow to rally after the assassination attempt there will include the family of the man killed by the gunman, as well as a host of other rally attendees, first responders and elected officials.

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  Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right congresswoman, wrote an X post that alleged some unnamed entity was controlling the weather. “Yes they can control the weather,” she said in a post. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” No word on who “they” refers to.

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“I’m freaking out about North Carolina,” one major Trump donor, who was granted anonymity to give his candid assessment of the race, told Reuters. “Georgia and Arizona are not in the bag, but heading in the right direction.”

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Reuters has more about the increasingly close North Carolina race between Trump and Harris:

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Trump leads Harris by 0.5 percentage point in North Carolina, according to a polling average maintained by FiveThirtyEight, a polling and analysis website. The former president leads Harris by 1.1 points in Georgia and 1.2 points in Arizona. All of those figures are within the margin of error for major polls, meaning either candidate could walk away with a victory…

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Some Trump allies privately say the race in North Carolina, which Trump won in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, is too close for comfort, even as they think he still has a slight leg up on Democratic rival Kamala Harris ahead of the Nov. 5 election.

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While Trump’s ad spending in the state has been relatively modest compared with most other battleground states, he has hit the campaign trail hard. His four campaign events in North Carolina, including stops in Wilmington and Mint Hill, in the last month outnumber those in any other state except for Wisconsin and Michigan, according to a Reuters tally.

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“Should we change the name from Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg?” Donald Trump asks the crowd in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home to the army base that was renamed Fort Liberty in 2023, as part of a Department of Defense effort to rename military bases that paid tribute to Confederate soldiers.

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The crowd cheered in approval.

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“We did win two world wars from Fort Bragg,” Trump adds. “This is no time to be changing names.”

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The Associated Press notes: “The North Carolina base was originally named in 1918 for Gen Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general from Warrenton, North Carolina, who was known for owning slaves and losing key civil war battles that contributed to the Confederacy’s downfall.”

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“I come from the middle class and I will never forget where I come from,” Harris tells the Flint crowd, pledging to support growth in cities like Flint and more “good union jobs,” including jobs “that do not require a college degree,” since a college degree is not the only measure of a worker’s skill or experience.

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Harris added, as president, she will highlight which federal jobs do not require a college degree, and challenge the private sector to do the same.

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Kamala Harris has taken the stage at a rally in Flint, Michigan, to sustained cheers. She was introduced by Eric Price, the president of the local chapter of the United Auto Workers.

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“We’ve got 32 days until the election,” she said. “32 days. 32 days.”

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2018 broke records as California’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire season. More than 1.6m acres burned. 100 people died as the fires destroyed the rural down of Paradise and razed homes across the state.

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But Donald Trump, who was president at the time, was reluctant to approve federal disaster aid for California, because he did not see it as a pro-Trump state, a former Trump aide told Politico’s E&E News on Wednesday.

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The former aide, Mark Harvey, was a senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council, and has recently endorsed Kamala Harris.

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Harvey told E&E News that Trump only changed his mind about providing federal relief to California after Harvey showed him voting results to demonstrated that “heavily damaged Orange County, California, had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.”

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“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” Harvey told the news outlet.

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Both Joe Biden and California governor Gavin Newsom responded to the news article, with Newsom calling it “a glimpse into the future if we elect @realDonaldTrump.”

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You can’t only help those in need if they voted for you.

It’s the most basic part of being president, and this guy knows nothing about it. https://t.co/FuPHwtlZuu

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 3, 2024

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A glimpse into the future if we elect @realDonaldTrump…

Trump was willing to hold back aid after devastating wildfires in California until he saw proof that people liked him.

He doesn’t care about America. He only cares about himself. https://t.co/Sec9XuhjZr pic.twitter.com/NRC5sNMzXl

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) October 3, 2024

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Here’s what Friday looked like:

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  President Joe Biden popped into the White House press briefing today. When asked about the November election, he said he was “confident it will be free and fair. I don’t know whether it will be peaceful,” given Trump’s rhetoric.

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  Biden also debunked claims from Marco Rubio that the positive jobs report was fake, saying “anything that Maga Republicans don’t like they call fake.” The September jobs report was unexpectedly strong, defying fears of an economic slowdown. The country added 254,000 jobs last month.

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  JD Vance spoke in Georgia this afternoon, telling undocumented immigrants “you’ve got four months, pack your bags, because you’re going home.” He also dodged a reporter’s question on whether the 2020 election was “rigged.”

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  Kamala Harris is in Michigan, where she first rallied in Detroit and called Donald Trump a “union buster” while praising collective bargaining for its benefits to workers.

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  Donald Trump announced that his return to Butler, Pennsylvania, tomorrow to rally after the assassination attempt there will include the family of the man killed by the gunman, as well as a host of other rally attendees, first responders and elected officials.

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  Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right congresswoman, wrote an X post that alleged some unnamed entity was controlling the weather. “Yes they can control the weather,” she said in a post. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” No word on who “they” refers to.

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Joe Biden said he is confident that November’s election will be free and fair but added: “I don’t know if it will be peaceful” – essentially because of the possible threat of violence from extremist Republicans.

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The US president made a surprise appearance in the White House press briefing room moments ago and took press questions.

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He was asked if he had confidence that it will be a free and fair election and that it will be peaceful.

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Biden said: “Two separate questions. I’m confident it will be free and fair. I don’t know whether it will be peaceful, the things that [Donald] Trump has said and the things that he said last time when he didn’t like the outcome of the election were very dangerous.”

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Q: “Do you have confidence that it will be a free and fair election and that it will be peaceful?”

President Biden: “I’m confident it will be free and fair. I don’t know whether it will be peaceful. The things that Trump has said…were very dangerous.” pic.twitter.com/HrhpaooEHe

— CSPAN (@cspan) October 4, 2024

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Trump said at a rally in Michigan this week: “We did great in 2016 and a lot of people don’t know that we did a lot better in 2020. We won. We won. It was a rigged election. That is why I am doing it again. If I thought I lost I would not be doing this again.”

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When asked if he will accept the results of the forthcoming election he hedges, saying he will “if” this or that. Experts called the 2020 election the most secure in US history and then-attorney general William Barr said there was no fraud that would have changed the result from a Biden victory.

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Kamala Harris is speaking at a rally in Detroit, Michigan, where she is vying for support from working-class voters and union members, who have long formed a base of Democratic party support. During her speech, she gave a shout-out to the United Auto Workers and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and told the audience that “collective bargaining benefits everybody”.

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Although unions overwhelmingly favor Harris, the Teamsters union and the International Association of Firefighters both declined to endorse in this election – a snub for Harris.

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During her speech, Harris blasted Trump for supporting right-to-work laws and for his administration’s anti-labor policies during his first term.

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“This is a man who has been a union buster his entire career,” said Harris. “As president, he did not lift a finger to save the pensions of millions of American workers.”

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During a rally in Lindale, Georgia, JD Vance struck an angry tone on immigration, telling undocumented immigrants: “You’ve got four months, pack your bags, because you’re going home.”

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According to a 2024 Pew Research report, about 11 million US residents in 2022 were undocumented immigrants. Donald Trump has vowed to implement mass deportations if elected, a draconian policy that experts have called “inhumane” and immigrant advocates worry would further marginalize Latino communities in the US.

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Here’s what’s happened so far today:

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  Kamala Harris will campaign this afternoon in Michigan, starting in Detroit and then going to Flint, as she swings through the swing state. The United Auto Workers put out a statement attacking Trump ahead of Harris’s visit.

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  Donald Trump announced that his return to Butler, Pennsylvania, tomorrow to rally after the assassination attempt there will include the family of the man killed by the gunman, as well as a host of other rally attendees, first responders and elected officials.

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  In other Trump news: he is mad that Harris keeps bringing up Project 2025, people leave his rallies because they are long and they have things to do, and that the Oklahoma superintendent wants to put bibles in schools – potentially the Trump-endorsed bibles.

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  The September jobs report was unexpectedly strong, defying fears of an economic slowdown. The country added 254,000 jobs last month.

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  Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right congresswoman, wrote an X post that alleged some unnamed entity was controlling the weather. “Yes they can control the weather,” she said in a post. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” No word on who “they” refers to.

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  The dock workers strike is over, for now, which is welcome news to the Biden administration.

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  The former president Barack Obama will hit the campaign trail for Harris starting next week.

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Kamala Harris will campaign in Michigan today, appearing first in Detroit and then in Flint. Her remarks in Detroit are scheduled to begin at 1.50pm ET.

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Harris was last in Michigan, a vital swing state, on 19 September for a streamed event with Oprah Winfrey.

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The mayor of Flint, Sheldon A Neeley, wrote an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press endorsing Harris today, saying: “I urge all of you to listen to her message, hear her vision and consider what she can do for you and for America.”

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Donald Trump will return tomorrow to the Pennsylvania town where a gunman tried to assassinate him this summer, bringing with him a host of elected officials and the family of a man who was killed by the gunman.

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The Trump campaign released a list of attendees for Saturday’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, “on the very same ground where he took a bullet for democracy less than three months ago”.

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The wife, daughters and sisters of Corey Comperatore, the firefighter who was killed that day, will be in attendance, as will various people who attended the first rally or served as first responders.

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JD Vance, the vice-presidential nominee, and Elon Musk, the owner of X, will also be there, as will be numerous congressmen, local elected officials, sheriffs and Republican party officials.

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The latest US jobs report showed the country added 254,000 jobs last month, defying fears of a hiring slowdown, the Guardian’s Callum Jones reports:

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Job creation unexpectedly accelerated in September, while the headline unemployment rate slipped to 4.1% from 4.2% in August.

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Economists had expected a non-farm payrolls reading of just 132,500 for September, after a cooler summer of employment growth.

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Hiring instead rose sharply from recent months. In August employers added 159,000 jobs, and in July they added 144,000.

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Both estimates for July and August were revised higher by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday – adding 72,000 more jobs than previously reported – highlighting the strength of the labor market.

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As November’s presidential election edges closer, the US economy is a key issue for voters. Earlier this week, a Harris Poll for the Guardian found that Kamala Harris’s economic policies proved more popular than those put forward by Donald Trump in a blind test.

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The poll nevertheless highlighted economic pessimism on both sides of the aisle, with almost half of respondents wrongly stating that the US was in recession.

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Read the Guardian’s full report:

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House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries does not believe that the New York mayor, Eric Adams, should resign from his post, despite the city leader’s recent indictment on bribery and fraud charges.

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“My view is that Mayor Adams, like every other New Yorker and every other American, is entitled to the presumption of innocence and entitled to a trial by a jury of his peers who will ultimately determine his fate within the legal system,” Jeffries told NBC News last night.

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“At the same time, it’s important for Mayor Adams to articulate to New Yorkers in a compelling way a plan and a path forward to ensure that the city is continuing to function and run in a manner that meets the needs of everyday New Yorkers and in a manner that New York City, which we believe is the greatest city in the world, deserves.”

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A number of prominent New York Democrats, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have called on Adams to resign given the charges against him, but the mayor has refused to do so.

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“This is a great moment to step up and show all New Yorkers, who are going through complexities in their lives, how you remained focused on your agenda and that’s what I’m going to do,” Adams said on Sunday after a visit to a church in the Bronx.

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He added: “I’m going to step up. I’m not going to resign – I’m going to reign.”

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Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a hard-right congresswoman of Georgia, is once again facing criticism for peddling a baseless – and just plan bizarre – claim about the weather.

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“Yes they can control the weather,” Greene said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

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The eyebrow-raising comment came as the death toll from Hurricane Helene rose to 215, after the storm tore through Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee last week. Greene had previously shared a map of the hurricane’s devastation overlaid with an electoral map to seemingly draw a (very questionable) connection between the two.

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Hakeem Jeffries should be the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Enjoy your weekend campaigning everybody. https://t.co/5NqVhCIy27

— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) October 4, 2024

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Greene did not specify who “they” were in her tweet, but she has a controversial history when it comes to weather claims. In 2018, Greene suggested California wildfires were caused by a laser beam from space that was connected to the Rothschild family, which has frequently been the target of antisemitic conspiracy theories.

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Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat of Hawaii, said of Greene’s tweet: “[House Democratic leader] Hakeem Jeffries should be the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Enjoy your weekend campaigning everybody.”

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For context, Republicans are trying to hold onto a narrow majority in the House this November.

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Joe Biden welcomed the tentative deal to end the east coast port strike and called it a “critical” step towards a “strong contract” for dock workers who had kept US ports open and supply chains running during the Covid pandemic.

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In a statement released by the White House, the president said:

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n

I want to applaud the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and the United States Maritime Alliance for coming together to reopen the East Coast and Gulf ports.

n

Today’s tentative agreement on a record wage and an extension of the collective bargaining process represents critical progress towards a strong contract. I congratulate the dockworkers from the ILA, who deserve a strong contract after sacrificing so much to keep our ports open during the pandemic. And I applaud the port operators and carriers who are members of the US Maritime Alliance for working hard and putting a strong offer on the table.

n I want to thank the union workers, the carriers, and the port operators for acting patriotically to reopen our ports and ensure the availability of critical supplies for Hurricane Helene recovery and rebuilding. Collective bargaining works, and it is critical to building a stronger economy from the middle out and the bottom up.

n

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Kamala Harris released a statement, saying she wants “to applaud all involved for their efforts”.

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The vice-president added that this “represents the power of collective bargaining. As I have said, this is about fairness – and our economy works best when workers share in record profits. Dockworkers deserve a fair share for their hard work getting essential goods out to communities across America.”

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Dock workers announced late on Thursday that they had agreed a deal with port operators to end a three-day strike that threatened to cause crippling disruption to supply chains.

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In welcome news for the Harris-Walz campaign, the International Longshoremen’s Association announced that the union agreed to a tentative deal with the United States Maritime Alliance on wages and will extend the contract through January 2025. Work would resume immediately, the union said.

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The tentative agreement is for a wage hike of around 62%, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters. Both sides said in a statement that they would return to the bargaining table to negotiate all outstanding issues in January.

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The strike had threatened to disrupt trade just weeks ahead of the election – and at a time when Democrats need good news on the economy.

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As the Guardian’s David Smith wrote earlier this week, the first dockworkers’ strike since 1977 could have snarled supply chains and caused shortages and higher prices if it had stretched on for more than a few weeks. That would have been a political gift to Trump, whose polling lead on the economy has been eroded by Harris. Both are vying for trade union support.

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Before the strike deal was announced, Trump tried to make hay of the stoppage, claiming at a rally in Saginaw, Michigan, that there would be no strikes if he is re-elected president.

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A local elections official who became a hero to election deniers was sentenced to nine years in prison on Thursday for leading a voting system data-breach scheme inspired by the rampant false claims that fraud altered the 2020 presidential outcome.

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Tina Peters allowed a man affiliated with the pillow salesman and election-lie trafficker Mike Lindell to misuse a security card to access the Mesa county election system.

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Jurors found Peters guilty in August, convicting her of seven counts related to misconduct, conspiracy and impersonation, four of which were felony charges.

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Good morning US politics readers.

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Former US president Barack Obama will crisscross the battleground states for Kamala Harris, with a kickoff in all-important Pennsylvania next week.

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According to a senior Harris campaign official, Obama will hold his first event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania next Thursday, the beginning of blitz across the handful of rust belt and Sun belt states that will likely decide the 2024 election.

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Obama remains one of the Democrats’ most powerful surrogates, second perhaps only to his wife, Michelle Obama. His return to the campaign trail follows a rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, where he cast Harris as a forward-looking figure and a natural heir to his diverse, youth-powered political coalition. Harris was one of Obama’s earliest supporters of what seemed like a long-shot presidential bid against Hillary Clinton. She knocked doors for him ahead of the Iowa caucuses in 2008. More than 15 years later, he will return the favor.

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With just 32 days away to the election, here’s what else is happening today:

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n
• n

  Kamala Harris will hold a rally in Flint, Michigan, this evening – one of the swing states critical to her winning the presidency. Her event comes a day after Donald Trump promised to make Michigan the “car capital of the world again”.

n

• n

  Trump and Georgia governor Brian Kemp will visit Evans, Georgia, to receive a briefing on the devastation of Hurricane Helene. They’ll give a press conference at 3.45pm ET.

n

• n

  JD Vance is in Lindale, Georgia, and will deliver remarks at 1 pm.

n

• n

  Trump hosts a town hall in Fayetteville, North Carolina, at 7 pm.

n

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Politics tamfitronics Summary

Wrapping up our US politics new coverage for today, though our Middle East crisis news updates will continue. Here’s our updated key news of the day:

• Kamala Harris campaigned in Michigan, focusing on her support from organized labor and pledging to support and protect “good union jobs.” In Detroit, Harris called Trump a “union buster” while praising collective bargaining for its benefits to workers. Later, in Flint, Magic Johnson appeared to endorse her and urge Black men to vote for Harris.

• Meanwhile, Donald Trump held campaign events in Georgia, where he appeared with Brian Kemp, the state’s Republican governor, who has been the target of Trump’s ire since Kemp refused to overturn the state’s 2020 election results in Trump’s favor, and then in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home to a major army base.

• Polls show the presidential race is tightening in North Carolina, a swing state Trump won in 2016 and 2020, leaving some Trump supporters concerned.

• Biden popped into the White House press briefing today. When asked about the November election, he said he was “confident it will be free and fair. I don’t know whether it will be peaceful,” given Trump’s rhetoric.

• Biden also debunked claims from Marco Rubio that the positive jobs report was fake, saying “anything that Maga Republicans don’t like they call fake.” The September jobs report was unexpectedly strong, defying fears of an economic slowdown. The country added 254,000 jobs last month.

• JD Vance spoke in Georgia this afternoon, telling undocumented immigrants “you’ve got four months, pack your bags, because you’re going home.” He also dodged a reporter’s question on whether the 2020 election was “rigged.”

• Trump announced that his return to Butler, Pennsylvania, tomorrow to rally after the assassination attempt there will include the family of the man killed by the gunman, as well as a host of other rally attendees, first responders and elected officials.

• Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right congresswoman, wrote an X post that alleged some unnamed entity was controlling the weather. “Yes they can control the weather,” she said in a post. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” No word on who “they” refers to.

As Trump faces an increasingly tight race in North Carolina, Trump’s campaign appears to be focusing on turning out the state’s large military population.

Donald Trump has wrapped up his campaign town hall in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where many of the questions from the audience came from strong Trump supporters and focused on military issues, from changing the name of the major army base in town back to “Fort Bragg,” a tribute to a Confederate general, to the issue of homeless veteransto the US withdrawal from Afghanistanto a last question from a man who said he was a former F15 pilot in the Air Force and then the Space Force, who said he was fired from his command position during the Biden administration for criticizing the military’s diversity, equity and inclusion trainings. He asked Trump if he would support a commission or task force to guard the military from “woke generals” in the future. Trump said he would appoint the man himself to such a commission.

“Thank you for taking time tonight to speak with our troops,” the man said.

Politics tamfitronics Polls show North Carolina is increasingly competitive, despite previous Trump victories

“I’m freaking out about North Carolina,” one major Trump donor, who was granted anonymity to give his candid assessment of the race, told Reuters. “Georgia and Arizona are not in the bag, but heading in the right direction.”

Reuters has more about the increasingly close North Carolina race between Trump and Harris:

Trump leads Harris by 0.5 percentage point in North Carolinaaccording to a polling average maintained by FiveThirtyEight, a polling and analysis website. The former president leads Harris by 1.1 points in Georgia and 1.2 points in Arizona. All of those figures are within the margin of error for major pollsmeaning either candidate could walk away with a victory…

Some Trump allies privately say the race in North Carolina, which Trump won in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, is too close for comforteven as they think he still has a slight leg up on Democratic rival Kamala Harris ahead of the Nov. 5 election.

While Trump’s ad spending in the state has been relatively modest compared with most other battleground states, he has hit the campaign trail hard. His four campaign events in North Carolina, including stops in Wilmington and Mint Hill, in the last month outnumber those in any other state except for Wisconsin and Michiganaccording to a Reuters tally.

As Trump once again baselessly claims that the Biden administration is failing to give adequate support to Hurricane Helene victims because many of them are Republicans, it’s worth revisiting this report from yesterday, in which two former Trump national security aides said that Trump was reluctant to give emergency funding to California after wildfires in 2018, until an aide showed him that many Trump voters live in California.

NEW: Two former Trump White House officials told me they had to show voter data to Trump to get him to release disaster funding to CA wildfire victims. He released it after learning that he had as many GOP supporters in Orange Co. as he did in Iowa. https://t.co/VU9fbGsOBl

— Scott Waldman (@scottpwaldman) October 3, 2024nn”}}”>

NEW: Two former Trump White House officials told me they had to show voter data to Trump to get him to release disaster funding to CA wildfire victims. He released it after learning that he had as many GOP supporters in Orange Co. as he did in Iowa. https://t.co/VU9fbGsOBl

— Scott Waldman (@scottpwaldman) October 3, 2024

“This is Katrina,” Trump says, of the government’s response Hurricane Helene, accusing the Biden administration of doing “the worst job.”

With a reported death toll of over 200 people so far, Hurricane Helene has been a catastrophic storm.

Hurricane Katrinaduring the George W Bush administration, claimed 1,392 lives, Axios reported, and sparked fierce debates over the government’s emergency response, with Kanye West famously alleging that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

But Hurricane Maria, during Trump’s presidency in 2017, claimed 2,975 livesmaking it the deadliest US storm of the 21st century. Axios reported.

Donald Trump is declining to sit on the armless swivel chair on the stage in Fayetteville, calling it “the most uncomfortable chair”.

“The one thing I don’t want is to fall on my ass, because that’s gong to be–that will be the only story,” Trump said. “I’m not sitting in that sucker,” he added. “I think it was a booby-trap. That was put there by Kamala.”

The crowd cheered.

In Fayetteville, Trump calls Harris “more left by far” than progressive US senator Elizabeth Warren, and “more left by far that crazy Bernie Sanders.”

“I know this will shock you, but that’s just not the case,” Bernie Sanders wrote in the Guardian this summer, in response to this Republican attack line.

At the Fayetteville town hall, an elderly veteran of the Vietnam war who sent Trump his Purple Heartin tribute to Trump’s survival of the attempted assassination attack this summer in Butler, Pennsylvania, is on the stage asking the former president a question about how Trump will prevent homelessness among veterans, and also “kicking these illegal aliens out of the freakin’ hotels and providing them with money” while veterans remain homeless.

The question may be related to a story that circulated in rightwing media earlier this year, and which turned out to be false:

Politics tamfitronics Trump takes stage in Fayetteville, home to Fort Liberty

“Should we change the name from Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg?” Donald Trump asks the crowd in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home to the army base that was renamed Fort Liberty in 2023, as part of a Department of Defense effort to rename military bases that paid tribute to Confederate soldiers.

The crowd cheered in approval.

“We did win two world wars from Fort Bragg,” Trump adds. “This is no time to be changing names.”

The Associated Press notes: “The North Carolina base was originally named in 1918 for Gen Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general from Warrenton, North Carolina, who was known for owning slaves and losing key civil war battles that contributed to the Confederacy’s downfall.”

Axios is reporting that venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, of Andreessen Horowitz, has emailed his employees to inform them that he and his wife “will be making a significant donation to entities who support the Harris Walz campaign,” after going public with his support for Trump in July.

Horowitz reportedly wrote that “Felicia and I have known Vice President Harris for over 10 years and she has been a great friend to both of us during that time” and said that their donations would be “a result of our friendship.”

NEW: Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz dumps Trump, plans “significant” donation to Kamala Harris https://t.co/DG0XwysaqX

— Dan Primack (@danprimack) October 4, 2024nn”}}”>

The SF Standard previously reported that Horowitz’s public embrace of Trump this summer was seen as an “astonishing about-face” that left longtime friends and acquaintances “scratching their heads,” since the Bay Area couple had previously been longtime Democratic donors, and Felicia had been outspoken about challenges for trans people in US as the parent of a trans child. (Horowitz tweeted angr ily about this particular article before it came out, denouncing it as a hit piece.)