From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Friday, October twenty five. Billionaire Richard White has resigned from the company that made him one of Australia's richest people. He's at the center of a sex scandal and although White is not accused of anything illegal, he's taking a break and will return as a consultant earning one million dollars a year.
Why have you resigned today, I'm not talking.
Are you concerned that that more women are going to come out in slight?
You can watch that exclusive video by our reporter Leam Mendez right now at the Australian dot com dot U. Can you believe it? The US election is just eleven days away. Kamala Harris has a man problem. Donald Trump has a trust problem. Today we meet the correspondents who'll be crisscrossing the States to you the best reporting and analysis of this crazy campaign.
You may need to open the AFT any event of an emergencygure.
This is American Airlines flight five two seventy nine from Washington, DC to Atlanta, Georgia, and on board is our reporter Joe Kelly oh Best.
Go ahead and stodos either in the overhead compartment or completely underneath sing in front of him. Same for laptops. Thank you.
Joe's recently moved to the States and he's getting his head around this vast, messy, brilliant, terrifying democracy. So it was nice for Joe to hear a familiar accent from the cockpit.
Weather in the Atlanta area right now, it's a light winds out of the west.
It's a good visibility.
Cliss guy's temperature of eighty degrees.
Please sit back, relax, Joe.
The flight local book.
Georgia is a crucial swing state. Donald Trump won it in twenty sixteen and Joe Biden took it off him in twenty twenty, but only just Joe's flown to Atlanta for a Kamala Harris rally as she attempts to bring it all back to Trump's character. Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?
Yes?
I do, Yes, I do. He himself has said he would terminate the Constitution of the United States and wants to earn your vote. To stand again behind the seal of the President of the United States.
On stage with Harris in Atlanta will be Barack Obama, Are you running a go? A couple of days ago, Obama joined eminem on stage in Detroit and wrapped his two thousand and two hit Lose Yourself No Notice.
My palms are sweating, Lose leek pis a heaven. Bama on my sweater, Runner on Spagunna.
I'm nervous, but I'm a surface, I'm a comb and run it.
The risk of rolling out a political superstar is that they upstage the candidate.
That's problem. I've watched Barack Obama's rally a couple of days ago, and the guy's electric. He's completely comfortable, He's full of charisma and energy, and he's so persuasive. Barack Obama and Bill Clinton are the great persuaders of politics, and he looks so natural making all these arguments about Donald Trump. What's Donald Trump's plan for healthcare? Well, he has for concept of a plan.
Now I want you all to think about this. Let's say your boss gives you an assignment, says, look, I need it by Friday. So Friday rolls around. Your boss says did you finish that project? And you said, well, actually I haven't started, but I do have a concept of a plan.
Obviously Kammler is trying to use him to the best of her ability to help her get over the line and deploy him as a political weapon. But I think the I think the reality is is that he is so much more effective in making these arguments than she is. But this is what she needs. She needs to be rolling out people like Barrick Obaman out. It really nail her message in. With less than two weeks now away from November five.
Kamala Harris is directly appealing to American women on the hot issue of abortion rights, but that leaves the Democrats exposed with the other half of the population. There's a significant differential in Harris's popularity with men.
I think there's been a problem for the Democrats over a long period of time which Trump has exploited. And I think this plays particularly towards young men who basically have this combative view towards the left now and in Donald Trump they see a figure and I conoclastic, irrev and political figure who's willing to give the middle finger to the left and the sense of political correctness and these trends of diversity, equity, inclusion, and some of these
narratives about toxic masculinity and so on. So I think if you look at it from that perspective, this is one possible explanation for why Trump has been able to say outrageous things from the absurd to the extreme, that any other politician would never be able to say and get away with, and yet not faced a penalty electorally.
They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating.
In fact, he seems to have been rewarded and edging closer. So I don't think that's something that you can really arrest in the final two weeks of an election campaign. However, I mean, if she loses, I think there will be some need to address this issue about appealing to young men. You can't just rely on young women to make up for young men abandoning you. So I think if they actually did something there that would make them more formidable.
But to look that's said, it's pretty late in the dapt for them to be able to rectify that.
I'd say, in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, Donald Trump was working a different angle, frying chips and flipping burgers at McDonald's.
This is not a normal situation, isn't it. I don't know. When you want a good looking family, how did you produce those.
Good looking kids?
Of course, the whole thing was staged. The McDonald's was closed. They weren't real customers.
Adam Crichton has been the Australians correspondent in Washington, DC for the past few years.
But it completely dominated the news cycle. And despite the fact that now he's definitely a politician, he's no longer a businessman, but he's still the master showman and he's just got his mind on how things are going to play in the media all the time. And I think that stunt, and it was a stunt, really worked very well for him.
He's got amazing stage presence. He is one of those people with the X factor, isn't he? How seriously do you think Americans are taking into account the things that they learned about him since the twenty sixteen election, for example, the events of January sixth, when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol, his reluctance to concede power. Have those things made a difference?
Yeah, look, I think they have and he must really regret his behavior on January the sixth.
We fight like hell, and if you don't fight, like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.
Because I think if he hadn't behaved that way, and of course he would dispute obviously that he did anything wrong, but I'm sure in private he'd be like, oh, if I just had have said a few more things, it wouldn't be so bad for me. And I think he'd be a shoeing to win because the reality is the Biden administration's very unpopular and Harris is walking on eggshells trying to distance herself from it while she still is the vice president and she still has loyalty to Joe Biden.
So it's a hard task. Now you have the huge influx of immigrants, which has been very unpopular in the southern border, and then of course you had a couple of years of nine percent inflation thereabouts, which hasn't happened in your decades. So those two things would ordinarily see the end of any government. But as you suggest, there is all this baggage that Trump has, and it is very huge, and it's certainly ways on his candidacy.
It has to Trump's seventy eight now, and he says if he loses, he won't try again in twenty twenty eight.
He pretty emphatically ruled that out a few weeks ago. It wasn't widely reported in the mainstream media, but no, he was pretty emphatic. He said, no, absolutely not.
I will not run again.
Coming up, can Trump actually win this? While I've got you, there's a new episode of our podcast Bromwin coming this weekend. It's the cold case investigation by one of the world's most famous investigative journalists, our very own Headley Thomas. You can check out the latter episode and hear all of Bromwin first and read all our exclusive stories by joining
us subscribers at the Australian dot com dot au. Cameron Stewart will bought a plane to America in the coming days, where he'll join Joe Kelly and Adam Crichton on the ground. His intern will be holding the fort here in Australia while he's gone. I like your fairy friend.
This is Corgy, a cat called Cordy.
As the Australian's chief international correspondent, Cam's covered his fair share of US elections. He was there in twenty sixteen and again in twenty twenty. Cam was at Capitol Hill on January sixth, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed Congress.
No presidential election has been this closed for so long, for sixty years. And what I think is remarkable about that, Claire, is We've never really had such leading drama. We've had a sitting president at the eleventh hour abandoned his candidacy. We've had two assassination attempts, complete with a bloodied the year and a defiant Vista pump.
Ready shoots down.
And we've had the sudden rise of a black woman taking on a newly convicted felon. After all of that, you would have thought somehow or either one of the candidates would surge ahead. But here we are almost deadlocked less than two weeks before the election.
Over the years, you've spoken to thousands of Americans, Cam, what's your sense now of where where America is at? Are they willing to give Donald Trump another chance?
I think they are potentially willing, Claire. It's interesting because the electric is changing. It's changed from the previous campaigns I've covered, and a lot of it has gone in Trump's favor to an extent. For example, Trump is now winning black and Hispanic votes that he never won before and that doesn't get these and the Hispanic voters are still overwhelming with Democrat, but he's peeling off one tenth of them or one fifth of them's according to some polls.
And you know that could be a really important fact that in a close race like this, we're seeing Trump his red red meat megabase is very loyal. They will never move. The key for Trump is can he win back the middle ground which he lost last time. Now in areas like the Hispanic vote, the Black volt and also just the mail vote. He's got very high support amongst men that fifteen percent advantage are compared to Krmala Harris.
So there are who is a solid constituency for Trump and it could be enough to get him over the line. But on the other side, we have a gender to bide here where Carla Harris enjoys a massive amount of support from women. They are of about fifteen percent as well. And also we have younger voters. The difference I think between this and the twenty twenty election I Covi Claire, is that a lot of younger voters are getting very
energized and enjoining this. They're registering for voting now, et cetera. On the Democrat side, mainly because they see Harris as a generational change a candidate where they didn't get that with Biden in twenty twenty. And I think that's something that the Democrats are really hoping will be a key factor here get out the vote amongst young Democrat voters.
Poles have been getting US voting sentiment wrong now for nearly a decade. So can we trust the polls this time around?
There's a critical question because in twenty sixteen, of course, the poles famously underestimated Trump. He came and defeated tell to read Clinton when he was up to three points behind on the day. So the poles were very wrong. And then all the posters said, hey, that's okay, we've fixed it. We've worked it out. This is the signment Trump voter, We're going to adjust our polls accordingly. In
twenty twenty, they are also disastrous. They underestimated the Trump vote by about three point five percentage points on average, So that meant that while Biden did win the twenty twenty lesion, he went up by far less than the poles were suggesting. Now the posters like the boy who crow Will are saying yes, we've fixed it again, believe us this time around. But now if they have, fine, But if they haven't, then Trump will win because the Poles are simply too close.
So if the.
Poles again underestimate Trump, he will win. And that's a real wildcard and that's certainly what a lot of Trump voters are quite hoping for.
Of course, you can read and watch all the reporting and analysis from Cameron, Joe and Adam for the coming eleven days and life coverage of the results as they come in at the Australian dot Com dot You. A day's subscription costs less than a small fry at McDonald's and that's not a stunt. Thanks for joining us on the front this week. Our team is Kristin Amyot, Leah Sammaglue, Jasper League, Josh Burton, Tiffany Demac and me Claire Harvey.