US Election Diary: Newspaper editors quit and a felt MAGA hat

Hi all, we’re making this a daily thing as both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris make their closing arguments over the next week and a bit.

Q+A's Jack Tame and I are now crisscrossing the nation to bring you the final 10 days of this election campaign on 1News and TVNZ+.

Here are some of the stories happening here not at the top of the Kiwi news bulletins.

It’s been reported that vice president Kamala Harris will hold her final election rally at the Ellipse, the location where then-president Donald Trump infamously told his supporters to “fight like hell” on January 6, 2021, after he lost the election.

They then marched up the road to the US Capitol and violently broke in.

The Ellipse sits between the White House and the Washington Monument in Washington DC. The US Park Service has reportedly granted permission for 20,000 people to attend the rally.

Kamala Harris has often spoken about January 6 on the campaign trail, saying the country needs to “turn the page” from the Trump era.

It has been tradition at many of America’s largest, oldest and most powerful newspapers to endorse a political candidate, but this year two big papers – the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, have decided not to.

Three board members at the LA Times have resigned over the decision, at odds with the non-endorsement call by owner Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong, who told the Times in an interview that an endorsement would exacerbate the existing deep divisions in the US.

"The non-endorsement undermines the integrity of the editorial board and every single endorsement we make," said one of the board members in their resignation letter.

Over at the Washington Post, at least one editor has resigned and its owner, Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon and is understood to be behind the call to not make an endorsement, has stayed quiet.

Both papers said they lost subscribers as a result of them not making a presidential endorsement.

Following yesterday’s update on the Trump McDonald's appearance, check out these guys’ DIY Trump merch at Trump’s State College Rally.

It proves that you can make anything out of felt and a glue gun.

“My dad came up with the idea, that we were going to buy them online, but they wouldn’t have arrived on time,” they told me.

They said college campuses in America tend to lean on the more liberal, but Donald Trump still had a lot of support. At their college, Bloomsburg, they said it was 50-50.

A quick reminder about election day itself, November 6 (New Zealand time)

While this is the official election day, many are not expecting a final outcome to be revealed that day unless there is an absolute landslide victory by one of the candidates.

Each state has its own procedures and rules around ballot counting, ballot recounting etc. Some states have huge cities where everything just takes longer.

And who knows what else might pop up.

So, while we could have a result on election night, I would put my money on that being very unlikely.

This article has some good information about the different states’ processes.