As the 2024 presidential campaign hurdles to a climactic finish on Nov. 5, the two major candidates made their closing arguments. Vice President Kamala Harris spoke on Tuesday at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., where she promised to be a unifier, casting Trump as a “petty tyrant” who wanted Americans to be “divided and afraid of each other.”

Trump made his final case in a six-hour long rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday that featured a comedian describing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” and mocked Jews, Hispanics, Blacks and Palestinians. The New York Times described it as a “a closing carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.” Many observers and historians have noted that Trump’s rally evoked memories of a 1939 pro-Nazi rally held at Madison Square Garden that was captured in an Oscar-nominated film, “A Night at the Garden.”

The 2024 presidential race remains razor close. But longtime campaign strategist Stuart Stevens is confident of the outcome.

“I think Harris is going to win easily. I don’t think it’s going to be particularly close,” said Stevens.

“It’s the most stable race I can remember. 47% of the country is either MAGA or open to MAGA and 53% isn’t. So the Harris campaign’s goal, task, challenge has been to get as much of that 53% as they can and get them to vote. So we wake up in a world where our Senator Bernie Sanders and my old friend Liz Cheney are on the same side. That’s not a bad coalition.”

Stevens was a top adviser on five Republican presidential campaigns, including for Mitt Romney, George W. Bush and John McCain, and he has been a consultant on dozens of GOP campaigns for governor, Congress and the U.S. Senate.

It’s not all about the presidential race and its few core swing states on Nov. 5: Beyond the battle between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, voters are deciding tens of thousands of offices and ballot measures.

Enter our annual cheat sheet to help you track this busy general election.

On this page, we have identified 540 elections (and counting) up and down the ballot, and why they matter. This includes powerful officials, from U.S. senators and state supreme courts to sheriffs and mayors, plus dozens of ballot measures.

Our guide features at least one non-federal election for all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico.

So, which districts that will decide who runs the nation’s tightest legislative chambers, what measures will shape criminal justice and voting rights, what counties feature conservatives who are hoping move local school boards to the right? Scroll down to explore what interests you below—or simply search for key terms like your state on your browser: The items will unfurl even when they’re closed.

You can also jump straight to the sections of this guide that break down the key state legislatures, the battle for Congress, attorneys general, state courts, state and local election officials, prosecutors, sheriffs, local leaders like mayors and councilors, and school boards, as well as referendums on abortion, criminal justice, drug policy, voting rights, labor, transit, housing, climate, education, and much more. Bolts has also published guides to all supreme court and all secretary of state races.

Keep an eye on other key races to be added through election day. But remember, this is not an exhaustive list but our selection of what to watch among thousands of possibilities. You can likely get a sample ballot on the website of your local election offices for a full list of what you’ll be voting on in your backyard.

We also encourage readers to visit Ballotpedia for its invaluable resources. And be sure to return on and after election night, as we will update with results once they are known.

I went to the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. Or I tried to. I wanted to see it, to feel it, to know it. I spent two hours smushed in a crowd of thousands, waiting in the cold, unable to move, in the midst of belligerent conversations, alcohol consumption, rantings and racist posturings. There were older Jewish men, Black families, Asian couples and young Latina women. I heard south Asian men calling Kamala Harris hateful slurs, others saying women needed to just shut up and listen to men. I saw working men showing off their jackets with artistic renderings of Trump as bullfighter slaying the deep state dragon. What I mainly heard and felt was grievance.

I’ve always thought America was a mean place. And what I mean by that is that it’s structured for meanness. It’s a place of winners and losers, people who matter and those who can be disposed of, a country built on violent theft of Indigenous lands and hundreds of years of enslavement of millions of Black people. It’s a place where when a person rises in status, they show it off to those who have less, rather than bringing them along. Where the rich and famous flaunt their wealth and clothes and fabulous lives every single day, and watching is a national past time. A place where most people get lost or abandoned, forgotten or judged. Where an ambitious few can turn that suffering into gold, but most get swallowed in self-hatred and despair.

We’re almost 250 years into this American experience and I would say the one common thing that this patriarchal racist capitalism has wrought is a primal insecurity that what you have can easily be taken away and who you are can be suddenly and forever erased.

And that insecurity is the rub.

For when fascists come, when those narcissistic tyrannical daddy figures arrive looking bigger than life, they instinctively know how to manipulate that insecurity. They usually do it by creating a class of people or a group of people who are less, who are othered, making the majority feel special, superior and safe. It’s the oldest, but most effective trick in the fascist handbook. Externalize the abstract self-hatred and insecurity, turn it into a real enemy and blame everything on them.

But there’s always the real story lurking on the edges, always the corruption and theft and dirty deals, always the sexual violence. A man told a woman I was with that she didn’t look like a typical Trump type. She was an older woman, he said, and most older women don’t like Trump. My friend asked him why he thought that was and he said something about it having to do with sexuality and my friend asked: “You mean because Trump’s a rapist?”

But in a land of mirages and heroin dreams, he’s the daddy projection screen. Terror and protector. Killer and fixer. Longed-for object and rapist. In the end thousands of us didn’t get into the Garden. In hindsight I realize I wouldn’t have lasted a minute before getting found out. I wouldn’t have been able to handle the metastasized energy of a nationalistic, racist, misogynist mob in service of its daddy lord.

As we walked away, Rudy Giuliani, a major felon and disgrace, barking madness on the jumbotron, a young woman doing an enthusiastic cheerleading act for “daddy Don” with red pompoms, I know more deeply than ever that it’s not enough to get rid of Trump, although that will be a very good thing. We have to devote ourselves to changing the conditions that gave birth to him.

V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a playwright and activist and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls

A man ingested a mushroom, berries and water to survive getting lost for more than a month in a Washington state national park, he has said in an interview about his nearly fatal experience.

In a compelling conversation with people.com published over the weekend, Robert Schock recounted how he “really felt … close to death” – and he had just lost control of his bowels – when what he believed would be his final desperate scream for help caught the attention of the person who ultimately saved his life.

Schock told the outlet his ordeal aged him “several years”, and he has sworn off ever returning to the North Cascades national park “anytime soon”. Nonetheless, he said he is physically “recovering pretty well” after having regained about 40lbs after his dramatic rescue from a kind of hardship others in his position have not survived

As he recounted it, the musician from Blaine, Washington, had previously been to North Cascades when he went to its Hannegan Pass trailhead on 31 July planning to run about 20 miles there alongside his dog. But he said he had not been in several years, and wildfires in 2021 as well as 2022 had wiped out the trail that had been there previously.

Schock had a map but it was old, and he quickly lost his bearings. His phone died on his second day in the park. By the third day, he sent his dog, Freddy, to find his way home.

Whatever else WaPo and LAT’s capitulation to Trump has done, it has focused attention on media failures this year.

I concluded back in February that the media was not going to help hold Trump accountable this year. I concluded that when zero traditional outlets pursued the story of how Donald Trump’s DOJ used a side channel to ingest dirt Rudy Giuliani collected from — among others — known Russian spies to criminally frame Joe Biden, with the Alexander Smirnov bribery allegation.

One candidate’s DOJ criminally framed the other candidate and it has been simply ignored.

That’s not the only way the media has failed. Hell, there have been maybe two stories about Trump’s abuse of pardons. There has been no scrutiny about whether Trump works for the Saudis, rather than the American people. We don’t talk about the fact that Trump stole 100 classified documents, and probably more we haven’t located.

This failure is not surprising. After all, the first act via which Trump cowed the media came with his success at spinning the results of the Russian investigation.

The Mueller investigation and its aftermath obtained legal judgments that Trump’s Coffee Boy, his National Security Adviser, his campaign manager, his personal lawyer, and his rat-fucker all lied to cover-up what happened with Russia in 2016. That’s an astoundingly productive investigation, one that should keep the issue of what really did happen at the forefront (particularly after Treasury confirmed that Russian spooks did get the internal campaign information Paul Manafort shared). And yet the media has never taken the time to fact check Trump’s Russia Russia Russia chant, via which he dismisses the result of the Russian investigation as a witch hunt. The media never calls him on that lie.

For whatever reason — perhaps ignorance, perhaps exhaustion — the media has allowed Trump to dodge accountability for the help Russia gave him in 2016. They have allowed him to apply a double standard on the Iran and Chinese hacks this year, when Trump invited foreign hacks in 2016. They simply ignored how in advance of 2020, Rudy Giuliani flew around the world soliciting help from — again, this is uncontroversial — at least one known Russian spy, right out in the open.

Greetings from Oklahoma. Here are a few thoughts from here on video about the decisions of the owners of the Washington Post and the LA Times to suppress their editorial boards’ decisions to endorse Kamala Harris.

A problem with the very wealthy is that, alas, the least vulnerable have a tendency to think of themselves as the most vulnerable.

And from that position they harm everyone else, while proclaiming that they are simply being neutral or following business interests. But doing what Trump wants in advance only makes it more likely that Trump will have power, and only teaches him that you are easy to intimidate. You are giving the authoritarian power he would not otherwise have. The irony is that the rest of us will have to save the billionaires from their own cowardice.

But that of course is not what this is moment is about. It is about all of us doing the little things we can, the truthful things we can, to get through this moment and come out on the bright side. In the video I explain why “do not obey in advance” is the main lesson of the twentieth century. In my book On Tyranny “Do not obey in advance” is the first lesson.

Please share this video. And please act. Vote, register people to vote, phone bank, keyboard, write letters, work a poll. Do something, and think of all the others who are doing what they can. You feel feel better, and you will make a difference.

Betsy Reed
Editor, Guardian US

Editor

Dear Guardian reader,

In the past 72 hours, two of America’s largest newspapers have declined to endorse a candidate for president in this election. The LA Times and the Washington Post both have a tradition of issuing editorial endorsements, but in this most consequential of contests for our country, they have chosen to sit on the sidelines of democracy and not alienate any candidate.

Something these two papers have in common? They both have billionaire owners who could face retaliation in a Trump presidency.

It has never been clearer that media ownership matters to democracy. The Guardian is not billionaire-owned; nor do we have shareholders. We are supported by readers and owned by The Scott Trust, which guarantees our editorial independence in perpetuity. Nobody influences our journalism. We are fiercely independent and accountable only to you, our readers.

We need to raise $2m in order to keep up our momentum next year. Your ongoing support has helped us enormously. Are you able to spare anything again today?

The stakes of this election could not be higher. Fearless journalism and an informed public are bedrocks of our democracy, and it is an abdication of our duty as journalists to sit out this election out of self-interest. A Guardian editorial strongly endorsed Kamala Harris for president earlier this week – and we are unafraid of any potential consequences.

Please help protect the truly free press by contributing to the Guardian today.
Make a one-time contribution

Yours,
Betsy Reed
Editor, Guardian US

A new temporary bronze installation depicting a pile of feces on Nancy Pelosi’s desk was erected in Washington DC this week across from the US Capitol, appearing to satirically “honor” the people behind the January 6 insurrection.

The scatological statue, which was installed on Thursday, features a swirl somewhat resembling the common “poop” emoji sitting on a desk with Pelosi’s name.

“This memorial honors the brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 to loot, urinate and defecate throughout those hallowed halls in order to overturn an election,” the plaque under the statue reads.
‘Fascist’, ‘conman’, ‘predator’, ‘cheat’: what 11 former Trump staffers say about him now

“President Trump celebrates these heroes of January 6th as ‘unbelievable patriots’ and ‘warriors.’ This monument stands as a testament to their daring sacrifice and lasting legacy.”

It's believed that Navalny was poisoned with the nerve agent Novachok. he recovered from the attack in Germany, and was arrested almost immediately after he returned to Moscow.

In the final moments of Navalny, Alexei gives a serious answer to the director's question about the risk he was taking.

"My message for the situation when I am killed is very simple, [to] not give up."

A look at his memoir.

In his posthumous memoir, Patriot, Navalny wrote - "If they do finally whack me, the book will be my memorial."

Though his voice has fallen silent, his wife Yulia Navalnaya is sharing his message. She now leads the movement her husband started, fighting Russian President Vladimir Putin's grip on power.

She spoke with NPR's Ari Shapiro about her husband's book, and legacy. For Navalnaya, it's a look into him in his entirety; including his unshakeable sense of positivity.

"I think that it was a kind of his superpower," Navalnaya told Shapiro. "That's why he was so popular. That's why people love him. That's why he had so many supporters. From one side, he was the leader of the Russian opposition. He was a serious politician."

But as he shares in the book, Navalny also wanted to be the ordinary guy next door.

"He was really funny. It's not about the book. It's about all of his life. I spent more than 25 years with him, and all the time, he was very funny and he was very easy. And he laughed a lot during very difficult moments in our life. And it helped a lot and it gave him a lot of strength."