Election 2024 recap: Harris hits Trump, addresses abortion rights in NBC interview Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are neck-and-neck in the race for the White House. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll on Tuesday shows Harris with a slim national lead over.
Trump in an incredibly close election race: while a top Harris advisor says each of the seven battleground states could be decided by a single percentage point. An exclusive USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll released Monday puts Harris at 45%, Trump at 44%, a closer race than the poll found in August.
- Keep up with the USA TODAY Network’s live coverage of the 2024 election. Republicans lose bid to revive Georgia ballot hand-count rule ahead of Nov. 5 election
- The Georgia Supreme Court rejected an emergency appeal from Republicans to get seven rules, including a requirement for thousands of poll workers to hand count ballots,
- reinstated in the final weeks before the election.
- The decision likely means none of the rules will be in place on Nov. 5 – Election Day.
The ballot hand-count rule was one of seven new rules struck down by trial Judge Thomas A. Cox Jr., who said in an Oct. 16 decision that the Georgia State Election Board lacked authority to pass the rules.
The hand-count rule in particular has garnered widespread criticism from election workers and officials, who have warned it could undermine public confidence in the election and set fatigued workers up to miss the state’s Nov. 12 county certification deadline.
Georgia Republican Party Chairman Josh McKoon called the state high court’s decision “supremely disappointing” in a statement posted on X. “We will press our appeal next year and hope for sanity to prevail.”
Obama: Trump’s mismanagement of COVID cost lives Former President Barack Obama suggested Tuesday that thousands of Americans who died of COVID might still be alive if Donald Trump hadn’t badly mismanaged the deadly pandemic.
Speaking at a campaign rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in Detroit, Obama said that when he left office in 2017, he handed Trump, his successor, a playbook for how to deal with a pandemic. Trump trashed it, he said.
COVID, which has killed 1.2 million Americans, would have been a crisis regardless of who was president, Obama said. But Canada’s per capita death rate from the virus was 60% lower than the United States’,
he said, suggesting that more than 600,000 American deaths could have been prevented. “That’s people’s grandparents, people’s parents, co-workers, friends,” he said.
“Some of those folks might be alive if we had a competent president who actually was paying attention and doing their homework and actually trying to make things better as opposed to telling people go ahead and inject bleach.”
At his own rally Tuesday night in Greensboro, North Carolina, Trump lashed out at Obama, calling him “a real jerk” and a “divider.
