The United States democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and its counterpart of republican Donald Trump are currently busy looking for Latino votes which are crucial to winning the White house.
With both candidates heading to the Western US today, their focus will be on gaining the support of Latino voters – an increasingly important demographic in American elections.
The Latino community has traditionally voted more in favour of Democrats, but recent polling shows a noticeable trend towards Republicans.
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Still, the latest New York Times/Siena poll showed Harris with 52 percent support among Hispanic voters to Trump’s 42 percent.
Both Harris and Trump have made direct appeals to Latino voters in recent weeks with Harris telling a crowd in Las Vegas that she will work to fix a “broken” immigration system if elected.
Although Trump has been gaining ground nationally with the community – despite his hostile rhetoric against migrants and refugees – he has faced blowback in recent days over racist comments that were made against Puerto Ricans and Latinos during a campaign rally in New York City.
“Nobody loves our Latino community and our Puerto Rican community more than I do,” he said in Pennsylvania this week as he tried to downplay the incident.
Meanwhile, both candidate are preparing to hold rallies in the Swing state of Nevada.
Aljazeera media network report that the state of Nevada at a glance with both Trump and Harris holding rallies in the swing state today, let’s take a quick look at Nevada:
Population: more than 3.1 million people
Electoral College votes: 6
Who won in 2020? Democrat Joe Biden
What was the margin of victory? Biden had 50.1 percent of the vote compared with 47.7 percent for Trump.
Did you know? Although Nevada is considered a swing state, a Republican presidential candidate has not won there since 2004.
In the same vein, GLOBAL TRACKER report that to win the White House, a presidential candidate must secure 270 Electoral College votes.
These votes are allocated to US states based on their representation in Congress – and in nearly all the states across the US, the presidential candidate who gets the most votes wins all that state’s electors.
Harris is projected to secure at least 226 votes from 19 states and the District of Columbia, with major contributions from California (54), New York (28) and Illinois (19).
To reach the 270 threshold, Harris will need at least 44 of the 93 battleground votes, with the easiest path for her going through Pennsylvania (19), Georgia (16) and North Carolina (16).
But the race in all three of those battleground states remains too close to call.
In another development, a new survey from major pollster Rasmussen Reports shows the Republican candidate with a 51 to 46 percent lead in Georgia, where President Joe Biden narrowly beat him in 2020.
In Arizona, Trump has a two-point lead, 48 percent to Harris’s 46.
In New Mexico, however, Harris currently enjoys a five-point lead, according to Rasmussen, with 49 percent of respondents saying they would vote for her and 44 percent siding with Trump.
Also, staunch Trump support and billionaire Elon Musk has been ordered to appear in court to respond to a lawsuit over $1m payments made by the billionaire’s political action committee (PAC) to voters in battleground states.
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This month, Musk’s campaign group, America PAC, started making the payments in what critics said was an improper and potentially illegal effort to drive up support and boost turnout for former President Trump, whom the 53-year-old founder of companies such as Tesla and SpaceX is supporting.
On Monday, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a Democrat, filed a suit to try to stop the America PAC sweepstakes, which is set to run until election day on Tuesday.