Trump and Harris head for swing states amid fallout from presidential debate – US politics live

11.49am BST

Young women are more liberal than they have been in decades, the Associated Press reported.

Over the past few years, about 4 in 10 young women between the ages of 18 and 29 have described their political views as liberal, compared with two decades ago when about 3 in 10 identified that way, according to a Gallup analysis of polling data.

The share of young women who hold liberal views on the environment, abortion, race relations and gun laws has also jumped by double digits, Gallup found.

11.46am BST

X’s AI chatbot spread voter misinformation – and election officials fought back

Soon after Joe Biden announced he was ending his bid for re-election, misinformation started spreading online about whether a new candidate could take the president’s place.

Screenshots that claimed a new candidate could not be added to ballots in nine states moved quickly around Twitter, now X , racking up millions of views. The Minnesota secretary of state’s office began getting requests for fact-checks of these posts, which were flat-out wrong – ballot deadlines had not passed, giving Kamala Harris plenty of time to have her name added to ballots.

The source of the misinformation: Twitter’s chatbot, Grok. When users asked the artificial intelligence tool whether a new candidate still had time to be added to ballots, Grok gave the incorrect answer.

Finding the source – and working to correct it – served as a test case of how election officials and artificial intelligence companies will interact during the 2024 presidential election in the US amid fears that AI could mislead or distract voters. And it showed the role Grok, specifically, could play in the election, as a chatbot with fewer guardrails to prevent the generating of more inflammatory content.

Read the full story here .

10.57am BST

Donald Trump a de facto Russian asset, FBI official he fired suggests

Donald Trump can be seen as a Russian asset, though not in the traditional sense of an active agent or a recruited resource, an ex-FBI deputy director who worked under the former US president said.

Asked on a podcast if he thought it possible Trump was a Russian asset, Andrew McCabe , who Trump fired as FBI deputy director in 2018, said: “I do, I do.”

He added: “I don’t know that I would characterize it as [an] active, recruited, knowing asset in the way that people in the intelligence community think of that term. But I do think that Donald Trump has given us many reasons to question his approach to the Russia problem in the United States, and I think his approach to interacting with Vladimir Putin, be it phone calls, face-to-face meetings, the things that he has said in public about Putin, all raise significant questions.”

McCabe was speaking to the One Decision podcast , co-hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove , a former head of MI6, the British intelligence service.

Read the full story here .

10.38am BST

Trump campaign publicly claims debate win but aides privately express doubts

Donald Trump ’s campaign publicly claimed victory in the debate against Kamala Harris on Tuesday night, but at least some of his aides privately conceded it was unlikely that he persuaded any undecided voters to break for him, according to people familiar with the matter.

“Will tonight benefit us? No, it will not,” one Trump aide said.

The sentiment summed up the predicament for the Trump campaign that with 55 days until the election, Trump is still casting around for a moment that could allow his attack lines against Harris to break through and overwrite her gains in key battleground state polls.

And it was an acknowledgment that despite their hopes of getting Happy Trump on stage, they got Angry Trump, who seemingly could not shake his fury at being taunted over his supporters leaving his rallies early and being repeatedly fact-checked by the moderators.

Read the full story here .

10.17am BST

Harris and Trump to campaign in battleground states after debate

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are focusing on swing states today.

Harris is scheduled to hold rallies in North Carolina – in Charlotte and Greensboro, the Associated Press reported.
Trump is heading west to Tucson, Arizona.

Yesterday, the candidates marked the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

At a fire station in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, close to where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed, Trump posed for photos with children who wore campaign shirts. Joe Biden and Harris visited the same fire station earlier in the day.

Updated at 11.49am BST

10.17am BST

Harris-Trump debate watched by 67m people, beating pivotal Biden showdown

Hello and welcome back to our rolling US political coverage.

An estimated 67.1 million people watched the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a 31% increase from the June debate between Trump and President Joe Biden that eventually led to the president dropping out of the 2024 race.

The debate was run by ABC News but shown on 17 different networks, the Nielsen company said. The Trump-Biden debate in June was seen by 51.3 million people.

Tuesday’s count was short of the record viewership for a presidential debate, when 84 million people saw Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s first face-off in 2016. The first debate between Biden and Trump in 2020 reached 73.1 million people.

There was a marked increase in younger and middle-aged viewers, with 53% more adults aged 18-49 tuning in to see Harris debate Trump than watched Biden do the same, according to Nielsen data.

Read the full story here .

Updated at 10.17am BST