Source : the age
Americans are heading to the polls in elections that could have major ramifications for the second half of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Polls will begin opening at 7am on the US east coast (11pm Tuesday AEDT). They will start to close from 6pm eastern time (10am Wednesday AEDT), with Texas and most midwest states closing at 9pm eastern (1pm Wednesday AEDT) and Alaska closing at midnight eastern (4pm Wednesday AEDT).
All seats in the US House of Representatives and a third of those in the Senate are up for grabs. The results will determine whether the Democrats can neuter Trump’s agenda or if he will maintain his grip on America until the presidential election in November 2028.
Here’s what has happened so far this morning:
- Trump closed the Republicans’ campaign for the midterm elections with a speech from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
- The speech was heavily focused on his remaking of the capital, Washington DC, and in particular the pool – the site of the botched renovation. He did not mention the election for the first 20 minutes.
- The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll – completed on Monday (US time) – showed Trump’s approval rating held near a record low. The results of the five-day nationwide poll also showed signs the race between Democrats and Republicans could be tightening ahead of election day.
- In his speech, Trump noted the latest plunge in the price of oil and pledged energy costs would come down “a lot further” once the war against Iran ended.
- Later, amid reports of pressure to act from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he raised doubts about whether he would follow through on a threatened resumption of military strikes against Iran and said a deal with Tehran could happen. Asked by reporters if he was considering striking Iran after the midterms, the president replied, “No”.
Washington: A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop demanding that California election officials set aside ballots from 20,000 people the Department of Justice says might be noncitizens.
The ruling on Monday (US time) by Chief Judge James Boasberg is the latest against the administration’s push to force California to separate ballots from people on a list of possible noncitizens.
California officials say the demand comes too close to the election, with millions of ballots already cast, and that the list is riddled with errors.
Boasberg agreed that the lists the administration had compiled were flawed. The judge also said the Justice Department was acting outside the scope of its legal authority, since the US Constitution assigns the role of administering federal elections to the states.
Americans are heading to the polls in elections that could have major ramifications for the second half of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Polls will begin opening at 7am on the US east coast (11pm Tuesday AEDT). They will start to close from 6pm eastern time (10am Wednesday AEDT), with Texas and most midwest states closing at 9pm eastern (1pm Wednesday AEDT) and Alaska closing at midnight eastern (4pm Wednesday AEDT).
All seats in the US House of Representatives and a third of those in the Senate are up for grabs. The results will determine whether the Democrats can neuter Trump’s agenda or if he will maintain his grip on America until the presidential election in November 2028.
Here’s what has happened so far this morning:
- Trump closed the Republicans’ campaign for the midterm elections with a speech from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
- The speech was heavily focused on his remaking of the capital, Washington DC, and in particular the pool – the site of the botched renovation. He did not mention the election for the first 20 minutes.
- The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll – completed on Monday (US time) – showed Trump’s approval rating held near a record low. The results of the five-day nationwide poll also showed signs the race between Democrats and Republicans could be tightening ahead of election day.
- In his speech, Trump noted the latest plunge in the price of oil and pledged energy costs would come down “a lot further” once the war against Iran ended.
- Later, amid reports of pressure to act from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he raised doubts about whether he would follow through on a threatened resumption of military strikes against Iran and said a deal with Tehran could happen. Asked by reporters if he was considering striking Iran after the midterms, the president replied, “No”.
Washington: President Donald Trump’s approval rating held near a record low as a broad swath of the US electorate saw their vote in Tuesday’s congressional elections as a way to oppose the Republican president, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Monday (US time).
The results of the five-day nationwide poll also showed signs the race between Democrats and Republicans could be tightening ahead of Election Day.
Some 46 per cent of registered voters in the poll said they would pick Democrats in congressional elections, compared with 38 per cent who picked Republicans, in what is known as a “generic ballot” question. That 8 percentage point advantage for Democrats was narrower than in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted a week earlier, when Democrats led by 11 points.
Generic ballot polls are national polls that provide an overall view of which party voters would like to see in charge in Congress. While these polls provide a view of national public sentiment, they do not capture the nuances of the state-by-state and district-by-district contests that determine control of the US Senate and US House, contests in which Republicans hold some structural advantages.
Washington: US President Donald Trump raised doubts about whether he would follow through on a threatened resumption of military strikes against Iran and said a deal with Tehran could happen.
Trump in recent weeks had hinted about renewing attacks on Iran after the US midterm elections on Tuesday. But after a speech at the Washington Reflecting Pool on Monday, he indicated he might be thinking otherwise.
Asked by reporters on Monday (US time) if he was considering striking Iran after the midterms, Trump replied, “No”.
The Iran war is a leading cause of high gasoline prices that are weighing on voters and Trump is under pressure to end the conflict.
Jerusalem: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing for another wave of strikes on Iran after Tuesday’s midterm elections in the US, according to two regional officials and a third person familiar with the matter.
A return to full-scale war with Iran could help Netanyahu to form an emergency government after he and his far-right allies lost their parliamentary majority in last week’s elections. US President Donald Trump has alternated between threatening major strikes while pushing for a deal with Iran.
The two officials said diplomatic efforts have made progress, with Qatari mediators holding two rounds of talks last week with Iranian officials. The two officials said the mediators are trying to advance a framework for Iran to cease its attacks in the Strait of Hormuz in return for the US lifting its blockade on Iran’s ports.
They said more talks are planned for this week. The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing classified briefings they had received from American, and in one case Israeli, officials.
Washington: Well, that was weird.
Not so much for the speech’s contents – we know how much Donald Trump cares about remaking Washington, in particular the Reflecting Pool – but for the timing, on the final day of the midterm election campaign.
As cable network MS-NOW noted, Trump did not even mention the election for the first 20 minutes of his speech.
And while he eventually got around to touting other achievements of his administration, the president’s priority today was clearly his Washington vanity projects.
Washington: After a short speech by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Trump returned to the podium talking about his other projects around Washington.
He announced a new “promenade” along the Potomac River, replete with statues of American heroes. “It’s a beautiful project,” he said. “It’s basically a walkway down to the water. We call it a promenade. It’s a great architectural concept.”
Trump plugs the forthcoming Triumphal Arch, which he promises will be bigger and more beautiful than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and his renovation of the nearby East Potomac Links golf course.
He promised discounts for Washington DC residents, who are broadly sceptical about replacing the 36-hole public golf course with an 18-hole championship course designed for PGA events.
Trump’s closing message was likely not one that hard-headed Republican strategists across the country will applaud.
“We have a lot of great things planned for Washington – and I could get into the nation, but for that you don’t have enough time,” the president said.
Trump notes today’s plunge in the price of oil. Brent crude futures are down about 8 per cent, and Trump pledges they will come down “a lot further” once the war against Iran ends.
The rising price of fuel has been a major issue in the campaign, although the president has generally not had a lot to say about it, other than to cast it as a necessary price to pay to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon.
At a recent rally, he boasted that American oil companies have been making billions of dollars in profit while motorists pay a little more at the pump – an observation he has avoided repeating since.
A lot of this speech has involved disparaging – without offering evidence – reflections on the Democrats, including Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and the party’s ballot hijinks in Alaska.
“The Democrat party has nominated the most extreme and dangerous slate of candidates in American history,” Trump says.
“All committed to the same radical agenda – open borders, raising your taxes by millions of dollars, taking away your guns, transgender mutilisation of your children, abolishing oil and natural gas, sending energy costs skyrocketing and opening the floodgates to millions of migrants from all over the world, hoping to get them to be able to vote.”
The president has been holding up photographs of the Reflecting Pool before the renovation, including shots of the pipes and past algae infestations.
He went into great detail about the construction process, including the granite edging. Now he has moved on to talking about his renovations to the White House – the ballroom, the new helipad – and other beautification projects around Washington.
Is anyone watching? Fox News is showing the speech live, while CNN is not. MS-NOW (formerly MS-NBC) is showing live vision of Trump but with talking heads giving commentary over the top.}
The free-to-air channels (CBS, ABC, NBC) are not showing the speech.
Washington: Trump begins his speech by joking that he’s going to rename the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in his own name.
“We’re giving serious thought to changing the name to the Trump Reflecting Pool. We’ll announce that some time tomorrow,” he said.
“I’m only kidding. Please don’t report it. They’ll cut it off and they’ll say, ‘He’s changing the name’. No.”
I have to admit, he had me fooled for a moment there. Given his penchant for naming things in his own honour, it wasn’t beyond the realm of imagination.
Now the president is repeating discredited claims that the Reflecting Pool was vandalised.
His government’s own lawyers conceded in court that the damage to the pool renovation was the result of a botched job by the contractors.
