Trump’s lead over Harris in red state plummets in new poll as Vance parrots pet-eating migrants claims: Live

Donald Trump’s lead in the red state of Iowa has plummeted, according to a new poll.

The new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll finds that the former president is leading Kamala Harris by just four percentage points in Iowa, with 47 percent to 43 percent of likely voters.

This is a drastic change from the 18-point lead Trump had over President Joe Biden in June, when the Republican had 50 percent to the Democrat’s 32 percent of votes.

Iowa was won by Republicans in 2016 and 2020.

“Coach” Tim Walz took a moment during a fired-up speech in Superior, Wisconsin, to give a shout-out to the Harris-Walz campaign’s most high-profile supporter — and reference a song off her Tortured Poets Department album.

Kamala Harris’s vice presidential running mate, accompanied by his wife Gwen, was in full pep-talk oratorical flow on Saturday afternoon when he decided to share some advice with the men in the crowd.

He is trailing Harris in fundraising, in most polls taken following their face-off in Philadelphia on Tuesday, and now in the poll-of-polls averages that political forecasters look to when making their predictions of who will win the November presidential election.

Perhaps most importantly, he is beginning to fall behind Harris in nearly all of the key states where voters will, under America’s byzantine electoral system, determine who shall serve atop the country’s executive branch for the next four years.

It’s a stunning and quick reversal of fortune for the former president, who has spent most of the time since he announced his third presidential campaign leading in those same polls.

Despite the candidate’s messaging troubles, the Trump campaign still believes they are ahead.

Pope Francis has waded into US politics in a rare intervention, criticising both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris as being “against life” and urging American voters to pick “the lesser evil” between the two.

Francis criticised Mr Trump’s policies towards migrants and Ms Harris’s stance on abortion, as he spoke to reporters on board his return flight after a historic Asia-Pacific tour.

While stressing that he was not an American and would not be voting. he expressed himself in stark terms when asked to weigh in on their positions on two hot-button issues in the US election that are also of major concern to the Catholic Church.

Republican vice-presidential candidate Senator JD Vance continues to stoke outrage against foreign-born members of his own constituency, sharing video footage with his 1.9 million social media followers that he claimed showed African migrants in Dayton, Ohio “eating cats” — but instead appears to show nothing more than poultry cooking on an outdoor grill.

Justin Rohrlich has the story.