U.S. election day live updates: A stark choice between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris

Millions of Americans are heading to the polls Tuesday as a chaotic presidential campaign reaches its peak in a deeply divided United States, where voters in only a handful of battleground states will choose the country’s path forward.

Vice-President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump have presented starkly different visions for America’s future, but polling shows the two remain in a dead heat.

“Any election in the U.S. is important and impactful for us,” said Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s ambassador to the United States. “They are central to our economic prosperity. They are a vital security partner.”

7:35 a.m. Opinion: Kamala Harris can’t stop America from hating women

America hates women. Were I writing this for a major American newspaper — within days of an election that might deliver the nation its first woman president, or in general — I would likely be asked to hedge my assertion. “It may seem that America hates women,” I would probably write, bequeathing women-hating newspaper readers just enough plausible deniability to hang onto their paid subscriptions.

Fortunately for all involved, I can drop those pretenses here. That’s because, outside of the U.S., the country’s hatred for women is plain. As of the 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade, abortion is fully banned in 13 states and heavily restricted in eight more; in parts of the country, women have been criminalized for miscarried pregnancies and stillbirths. The U.S. accounts for 70 per cent of female homicide victims from high-income countries and has the highest maternal mortality rate of the so-called “developed” world. Perhaps most telling of all, the country elected Donald Trump to be its president, and may do so again.

A presidential campaign marked by upheaval and rancor approached its finale on Election Day as Americans decided whether to send Donald Trump back to the White House or elevate Kamala Harris to the Oval Office.

Voters on Tuesday faced a stark choice between two candidates who have offered drastically different temperaments and visions for the world’s largest economy and dominant military power.

6:30 a.m. Opinion: ‘Tomorrow! The sun’s coming up now!’ Inside Kamala Harris’s overly complicated, utterly exhausting final act in Philadelphia

Kamala Harris’s final argument to the American people — an exhausting and often baffling rally in Philadelphia — played out Monday night like a conservative fantasy of the worst that can happen when liberals are left in charge: It was expensive. It was overcomplicated. It left many of the people it purported to serve unsatisfied, annoyed and increasingly alienated as the night went on.

From a logistics point of view it was easily the worst large political event I have ever attended, and I covered Donald Trump in 2016. If it was a sign of how the broader Harris campaign was operating heading into election day, I fear it was a catastrophic one, at least for anyone desperate to move on from the last, endless decade of Donald Trump.

Canadians are eager to see how the results of the contentious U.S. presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will shape the next four years.

But before they can get to that, they’ll have to tune in on Tuesday — not so simple, thanks to a media landscape that’s more fragmented than ever.

“A good chunk of Canadians are getting their news mostly from the internet,” says Philip Mai, co-director of the Social Media Lab at the Ted Rogers School of Management.

Weather conditions can be one factor in how many people vote in person on Election Day.

The strongest weather in the U.S. forecast for Tuesday is in Montana where there could be blizzard conditions, but that state is not a battleground and is strongly favored to go for Donald Trump.

Key battleground states including Michigan and Wisconsin are expected to see some rainfall.

Monday 10 a.m. Doug Ford warns of the perils of protectionism on the eve of U.S. election

Ahead of Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election, Premier Doug Ford is warning that protectionism would hurt Ontario, America’s third-largest trading partner.

Ford — who has expressed concern about the threat by former president Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, to slap hefty tariffs on foreign goods and services — underscored the importance of trade between the province and U.S. states.

“Regardless of the outcome of this week’s elections, we stand ready to work with our partners south of the border,” the premier said in a statement Monday.

Word came unexpectedly in January 2017 that President Donald Trump wanted to talk to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Officials scrambled to connect the two leaders and racked their brains: what urgent matter had they not foreseen?

Trudeau had already had a friendly congratulatory call with the newly inaugurated Republican president. Trump, who campaigned on ripping up the North American free trade deal and forcing Canada and all NATO allies to spend more on defence, riffed on Trudeau’s famous father, the former prime minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau.

Among the millions glued to their TV sets Tuesday night watching U.S. election results will be a group of people in Montreal with a particular connection to Democratic candidate Kamala Harris — her high school classmates.

Long before she became an American vice-president and presidential candidate, Harris spent several years in Montreal and attended Westmount High School from 1978 to 1981.

While she doesn’t talk much about that time, one of her former classmates believes her high school years helped shaped who she would become.

Opinion: A final U.S. election plea to Trump’s MAGA supporters: Make America Sane Again

We’ve had a rough ride over the last decade. I’ve written mean things about you. You’ve emailed mean things to me. It’s a hostile standoff in which I unfairly label you as dipsticks and you casually wish for my death in a fiery car crash.

Bygones! With the U.S. election less than 100 hours away, I come to you with an olive branch and one question: Can you survive a Trump 2.0?

As the Washington Post reported in 2021: “No other modern president has left the U.S. with a smaller workforce than it had when they took office.” Politico: “America’s trade gap soared under Trump.” FactCheck.org: “The federal debt held by the public went up, from $14.4 trillion to $21.6 trillion.” The Atlantic: “Trump is the worst president in history.”

Opinion: Donald Trump is going to win the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Here are three reasons why

If there is one thing I’ve learned in my time writing this column, it’s that readers, especially those who read regularly, would rather I be direct, precise and dead wrong, than prevaricating, wishy-washy and possibly correct.

Donald Trump is going to win the 2024 U.S. presidential election. On election night. Decisively.

Opinion: ‘When he talked about Puerto Rico, it was like, ‘That’s not them, that’s me’:’ Will one bad joke sink Donald Trump in the swingiest swing state in America?

The suburban collar counties of Philadelphia, a leafy stole draped on the shoulders of Pennsylvania’s largest city, exist in the American political imagination much like the Toronto suburbs do in the Canadian. No one in the country at large thinks about them all that much, in other words, until election years, when everyone thinks about them all of the time.

Opinion: Pennsylvania is on fire: What we don’t talk about when we talk about Donald Trump

The weather in Philadelphia, just about everyone in Philadelphia is eager to say, is not normally this hot in November. The grass isn’t normally this yellow, either. The sidewalk cafes aren’t normally full at night. There aren’t normally lineups for ice cream outside in the month when the snow used to come, and the air used to freeze, and the late fall winds used to strip the trees of their last, carotenoid-laden leaves.

I landed in Philadelphia to cover the final days of the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 1. It was the region’s 33rd consecutive day without rain. The city itself had tied a record the day before for the hottest Halloween in history. It hit 28 C that afternoon and stayed hot overnight. On Friday, in nearby West Chester, a red-faced Secret Service agent desperately tried to inch into the shade while searching guests headed into an appearance by Doug Emhoff, the Second Gentleman of the United States. Earlier that day, in Allentown, north of the city, the mayor, wearing a black T-shirt and dark blue jeans, begged to do an interview in the shade after hosting a press conference with Rosie Perez.

Working class. Muscle class. Blue collar.

Whatever you call them — pollsters define the demographic as people without college degrees — they’re a great big chunk of labour that Kamala Harris is reportedly shedding by the day.

In Michigan, automotive workers, factory workers, steel mill workers — trade unionists — who have long flocked to the Democratic Party, a reliable voting bloc down through the decades. The union members who, in 2020, allowed President Joe Biden to carry the state — and its 16 electoral votes — by 154,000 votes, seizing the battleground state back from Donald Trump, who’d surprisingly claimed Michigan in 2016 by a razor-thin 0.23 per cent.

The American election is dread-locked.

That is, each side sees the other through a glass darkly, existentially calamitous for the country. In these waning hours of full throttle door-knocking and frenetic phonebank calling, foreboding rhetoric has been ratcheted to a smoke alarm pitch.

But this isn’t the end of days, whatever happens Tuesday. The republic survived Donald Trump once, it can do so again, should it come to that. And Kamala Harris isn’t a Marxist, or “crazy,” or “low I.Q.” — among the milder insults her opponent has thrown at her. Neither can undo 248 years of democracy forged in the fire, though only one has threatened to terminate the Constitution.

It’s the election that no one could have foreseen.

Not so long ago, Donald Trump was marinating in self-pity at Mar-a-Lago after being impeached twice and voted out of the White House. Even some of his closest allies were looking forward to a future without the charismatic yet erratic billionaire leading the Republican Party, especially after his failed attempt to overturn an election ended in violence and shame. When Trump announced his comeback bid two years ago, the New York Post buried the article on page 26.

At the same time, Kamala Harris was languishing as a low-profile sidekick to President Joe Biden. Once seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party, she struggled with both her profile and her portfolio, disappointing her supporters and delighting her critics. No one was talking about Harris running for the top job — they were wondering if Biden should replace her as his running mate when he sought a second term.

Election Day is nearly upon us. In a matter of hours, the final votes in the 2024 presidential election will be cast.

In a deeply divided nation, the election is a true toss-up between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump.

We know there are seven battleground states that will decide the outcome, barring a major surprise. But major questions persist about the timing of the results, the makeup of the electorate, the influx of misinformation — even the possibility of political violence. At the same time, both sides are prepared for a protracted legal battle that could complicate things further.

The U.S. presidential election is here. Tomorrow, millions of Americans will go to the polls in what will be one of the world’s most-watched elections.

Swing states, faithless electors, the electoral college — there’s a lot to know about the uniquely American spectacle that happens every four years. As our largest trading partner and border-sharing neighbour prepares to elect its next head of state, Canadians are waiting with baited breath to see who will land in the White House: Democratic nominee Kamala Harris or the Republican alternative, Donald Trump.