Biden and Trump hit US midterms campaign trail to make final pitch to voters – live

Nadeem Badshah

Volker Türk, the new United Nations high commissioner for human rights, yesterday urged Twitter owner Elon Musk to make respect for human rights central to the social media platform, amid savage cuts to the tech company’s staff under its new chief.

In an open letter, Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said that reports of the new owner laying off the platform’s entire human rights team were “not, from my perspective, an encouraging start”.

Türk said he was writing with “concern and apprehension about our digital public square and Twitter’s role in it”.

He also warned against propagating hate speech and misinformation and highlighted the need to protect user privacy, saying free speech was “not a free pass”.

Since his $44bn takeover, Musk has dissolved the company’s board, sacked its CEO, Parag Agrawal, along with senior managers, and began mass layoffs last Friday.

Türk, who posted the open letter on Twitter, where he has more than 25,000 followers, wrote: “Like all companies, Twitter needs to understand the harms associated with its platform and take steps to address them.

“Respect for our shared human rights should set the guardrails for the platform’s use and evolution. In short, I urge you to ensure human rights are central to the management of Twitter under your leadership.”

You can read the full story here.

Elon Musk has just posted on Twitter, the social media platform he now owns, endorsing the Republicans in the US midterm elections.

Musk is the entrepreneur behind Tesla electric cars, SpaceX rockets and now Twitter, the social media platform so beloved of politicos and journalists.

He further noted:

David Smith

Joe Biden is fighting a rearguard action to stave off defeat in Tuesday’s midterm elections as Republicans look poised to make sweeping gains in the US Congress, setting up two years of political trench warfare.

The president, along with former president Barack Obama, has been crisscrossing America in a last-ditch bid to persuade voters that a Democratic victory is critical not only to Biden’s legislative agenda but the preservation of American democracy.

But momentum appears to be with Republicans capitalising on frustration over inflation and fears of crime and illegal immigration. Election forecasters and polls say it is highly likely that the party of ex-president Donald Trump will win a majority in the House of Representatives and also have a shot of taking control of the Senate.

“Republicans are peaking at the right time,” said Brendan Buck, a former aide to Republican House speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner. “Democrats did a good job defying political gravity for a long time but it’s finally catching up to them. It feels like a healthy Republican majority in the House and, if I were a betting man, I would guess that Republicans pick up the one Senate seat that they need.”

Midterms are held every four years but in 2022 they are far from routine and have seen a huge increase in early voting turnout. Tuesday’s election represents the first nationwide test of democracy since Trump’s followers staged a deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 last year.

A surprise Democratic victory in the House and Senate would give Biden a mandate to pursue a sweeping legislative agenda on issues such as abortion rights, police reform and voting rights during his two remaining years in the Oval Office.

But Republican control of either chamber would be enough to derail such ambitions and raise questions over the US’s open-ended support for Ukraine’s war against Russia.

Full report here.

Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin said today he had interfered in US elections and would continue doing so in future, the first such admission from a figure who has been formally implicated by Washington in efforts to influence American politics, Reuters writes.

In comments posted by the press service of his Concord catering firm on Russia’s Facebook equivalent VKontakte, Prigozhin said:

We have interfered (in US elections), we are interfering and we will continue to interfere. Carefully, accurately, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do.

The remark was posted on the eve of the US midterm elections in response to a request for comment from a Russian news site.

During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once,” Prigozhin said. He did not elaborate on the cryptic comment.

Prigozhin, who is often referred to as “Putin’s chef” because his catering company operates Kremlin contracts, has been formally accused of sponsoring Russia-based “troll farms” that seek to influence US politics.

In July, the US state department offered a reward of up to $10m for information on Prigozhin in connection with “engagement in US election interference”. He has been hit by US, British and European Union sanctions.

Prigozhin kept a low public profile until recently but has become more outspoken in the course of the Ukraine war, including by criticising the performance of Russia’s generals.

In September he admitted to founding the Kremlin-aligned Wagner Group mercenary group, which is active in Syria, Africa and Ukraine.

We’ll have more on this from Guardian reporters later.

It’s the last full day of election campaigning before the big vote tomorrow. US president Joe Biden and former president and Republican beacon Donald Trump will be out on the trail in a contest where so much is at stake for each of their parties – and American democracy.

It’s a tough battle for the Democrats against strong economic headwinds in the shape of record inflation and fears of recession, despite the fact that such gales are howling across many other countries as well, driven by ongoing fall-out from the pandemic and the effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The party has been struggling against their president’s low approval ratings for more than a year now – though it hopes the shock of the US Supreme Court stripping federal abortion rights when it overturned Roe v Wade in June and the threat of extremism from the right will boost their chances.

Republicans hope not only to pick up the traditional midterms backlash against the party in power but to power a “red wave” and win big, wresting the majority in both the House and Senate from the Democrats.

Biden is rallying in the governor’s race in Maryland tonight and Trump is stumping in Ohio, where Democratic congressman Tim Ryan is battling JD Vance. Biden’s warning of what will happen to the US economy if Republicans ever get a chance to wreck the healthcare and retirement benefits backbone.

We’ll have a Guardian reporter at each event tonight, in Bowie, Maryland, and Dayton, Ohio.

All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are on the line, 35 out of 100 Senate seats are being contested in these midterms election.

It’s not exactly clear who will pursue the Republican nomination for president in 2024, but now we know someone who will not be: Tom Cotton, the US senator from Arkansas.

Cotton on Monday told the Republican-friendly Fox News network that he will not seek the Oval Office in two years because it was “not the right time” for his family. His remarks confirmed a Politico report late Sunday that, citing anonymous sources, said Cotton would not enter a field of GOP presidential nominees that could include former president Donald Trump and Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis.

“Family was really the only consideration,” Cotton, who has a wife and two children, said to Fox. “This is not the right time for our family for me to commit to a six-to-seven day a week campaign for the next two years.”

The 45-year-old Cotton is a former soldier who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Arlington Cemetery before entering politics as a foreign policy hawk. He’s been a senator for Arkansas since 2015, and his current term doesn’t expire until 2027.

Cotton voted to acquit Trump both times the former president was impeached, the second time for inciting the US Capitol attack on January 6 2021.

The senator published a book on 31 October, Only the Strong: Reversing the Left’s Plot to Sabotage American Power, in which he bragged about refusing to pay attention to Trump’s first impeachment trial before voting to acquit him. The book also criticizes the White Houses helmed by Democrats Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

Good morning, US politics live blog readers, it’s midterms Monday, the last campaign day before those who haven’t already voted go to the polls tomorrow in an election that’s a crucial taking of America’s political temperature this November. It will be a busy day, here’s some of what’s coming up:

• Joe Biden and Donald Trump both plan to be back on the stump today after a frantic weekend of campaigning, where the US president turned out with his Democratic predecessor and former boss, Barack Obama, and Trump, the ex, one-term Republican US president, showed he is still the most powerful force in his party.

• Biden campaigned in super-swing, super-crucial Pennsylvania at the weekend but tonight is playing safer and closer to home with an appearance in Maryland for gubernatorial candidate Wes Moore, who appears to have a decent chance of making history as that state’s first Black governor.

• Trump stump: the Donald will be back in Ohio tonight, in Dayton, to rally in a state that has rallied around him. The stakes are very high in a race for an open seat in the US Senate, with rightwing author and Trump convert JD Vance trying to secure the win over congressman and ex-presidential candidate Tim Ryan.

• More than 40 million Americans have already cast their ballots in early voting. There are almost 170 million registered voters in the US and a big turnout is expected in on-day voting tomorrow. Results may take a while to come in because of so many different rules across different states.

• The Democrats are fighting to keep control of the House of Representatives (though analysts expect them to lose), where all 435 seats are being contested and the US Senate (analysts say “toss-up”), where 35 out of the 100 seats are in contention, against a backdrop of high inflation.

• The effectiveness of the remainder of Joe Biden’s first term, and probably the health of Democrats’ prospects of holding onto the White House in 2024, are on the line, as well as many aspects of the embattled US democratic machine.