First thing election special: two visions of America, one day to choose

Good morning. More than 93 million Americans have already cast their ballot in the 2020 presidential election, which is more than two-thirds of the total turnout in 2016. In Texas and Hawaii, early voting numbers have already surpassed the total vote four years ago. Yet with just 24 hours to go until election day, and even with the polls still stubbornly in Joe Biden’s favour, the results – and their timing – remain unpredictable.

Criss-crossing the swing states for our Anywhere but Washington series, Oliver Laughland has met voters with two very different – and apparently irreconcilable – visions for the future of America. It is a measure of the volatility of this election that at least one reporter has requested a bullet-proof vest to cover its aftermath, writes the Guardian US editor, John Mulholland:

It’s not just paramilitaries and threats of violence which are causing us to prepare differently for this election. Ordinarily we would expect an election result – at the latest – in the early hours of Wednesday morning. That could still happen, assuming a very decisive victory for either party. But, as almost everyone now knows, this election result may not be known for days, or even weeks, such is the number of people voting by mail.

• You can get instant results delivered to your phone on election day – and beyond – with the Guardian’s live-updating app alert. Here’s how to sign up.

Trump says he’s ‘going in with the lawyers’ to claim the election

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Trump says he’s ‘going in with our lawyers’ as soon as the election is over – video

Donald Trump began a sprint through the swing states on Sunday, with 10 rallies planned in seven states over the last two days of the campaign. Axios reported that the president plans to declare victory on election night “if it looks like he is ‘ahead’”, to counter a potential “blue shift” in votes counted after Tuesday. Trump denied the report, but warned: “As soon as the election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers.”

While the president has so far failed to articulate a coherent manifesto, his critics have a pretty good idea what Americans could expect from a second Trump term, writes David Smith: “Widening chasms between rich and poor, justice and racism, truth and lies.” For the latest edition of the Today in Focus podcast, Chris McGreal asked several voters who swung behind Trump in 2016 why they’re sticking with him in 2020.

• Trump’s own efforts to spread election disinformation have done more to undermine faith in US democracy in 2020 than foreign interference by the likes of Russia and Iran, as Julia Carrie Wong reports.

• Sean Connery did not help Trump to get planning applications approved for a golf course in Scotland, contrary to the president’s claims, though the late actor did publicly voice his approval for the project.

• Dozens of historians of authoritarianism have signed a letter warning democracy is “withering or in full-scale collapse globally.” The experts disagree on whether to label Trump a “fascist,” but they warned:

The temptation to take refuge in a figure of arrogant strength is now greater than ever.

An Iowa poll rattles Democrats, but Harris stumps in Texas

For many Biden supporters, the specter of 2016 looms large – which is why a new poll of Iowa released on Saturday sent some into a panic. The Selzer & Co survey showed Trump with a seven-point lead: the same margin he enjoyed over Hillary Clinton, in the same poll, days before he beat her by 9.4% in the Hawkeye state and clinched the presidency.

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Joe Biden campaigns with Barack Obama in Flint, Michigan – watch live

That poll remains an outlier, however – and in a state Trump was already expected to retain. Biden spent the weekend in more vulnerable swing states, while his running mate, Kamala Harris, was on the stump in Texas, suggesting Democrats still think they could flip the nation’s second-biggest electoral college prize. Daniel Strauss and Lauren Gambino look back on a campaign that came close to collapse during the primaries, but is now within reach of the White House.

In other election news…

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Convoys of Trump supporters take to roads after Biden campaign bus incident – video

• Convoys of Trump supporters have taken to roads across several US cities, as the FBI investigates an incident in which the drivers of a “Trump train” swarmed a Biden campaign bus on a Texas highway and were praised by Trump as “patriots”.

• Trump has threatened to fire Anthony Fauci after the election. The administration’s top Covid expert warned in a Washington Post interview this weekend that the US is “in for a whole lot of hurt” from the pandemic over the winter months.

Stat of the day

The Texas supreme court has rejected a Republican request to toss out almost 127,000 ballots cast at drive-through voting places in Harris County, Texas – a vast Democratic stronghold that comprises much of the city of Houston. A federal judge is expected to rule on the same issue on Monday, and could come to a different decision, voting rights activists have warned.

Conservative activists claim counting the ballots from the drive-through locations, which were set up to allow safe voting amid the coronavirus pandemic, would “call into question the integrity and legality of a federal election.”

View from the right

Many of Jonah Goldberg’s fellow conservative commentators have already written pieces explaining why they won’t vote for Trump. Instead of adding another to the pile, writes Goldberg for the Dispatch, he is offering a prediction – Trump will lose – and an explanation:

Thanks to his inability to let go of the 2016 mindset combined with his belief that the single best thing about his presidency was him—not his policies, not his accomplishments, just him—he didn’t think he needed to promise anything concrete for his second term other than more him.

Don’t miss this

Amid one of the most consequential presidential elections in memory, it is easy to overlook the local races that are also on the ballot this year. But as David Daley explains, the make-up of legislatures in Texas, Wisconsin, North Carolina and several other states will determine how their electoral maps are redrawn – and potentially gerrymandered – after the 2020 census. And that will shape the electoral college for at least the next decade.

Last Thing: an intellectual history of the Trump era

Book reviewer Carlos Lozada has made a study of some 150 often trashy tomes written about the Trump presidency, and from it produced his own intellectual history of the past four years. His book, What Were We Thinking, is “an utter marvel,” says Peter Conrad: “Sober though frequently very funny, fairer minded than the subject deserves, in the end profoundly troubling even as it looks ahead to America’s recovery from the Trump malaise.”

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