US election 2020: more than 70m Americans have voted early – live

Attendees of a late-night Trump rally at the airport in Omaha, Nebraska, have been stranded for a time in the cold at the site because of limited traffic flow on the two-lane road that accesses the private east side of the airport where the rally was held.

A large portion of the crowd, estimated to be in the thousands, remained at the site waiting on buses hours after Trump’s plane had departed, according to reporters on the scene. Outside temps are about at the freezing point.

Trump is in Omaha because it shares a media market with a lot of Iowa, where Trump appears to be trailing Biden despite winning the state in 2016 by almost 19 points. Also, Nebraska splits its electoral votes by congressional district – Maine does too but every other state is winner-takes-all – and the second congressional district in Douglas County there is polling strongly for Biden, potentially giving the Democrat its one electoral vote, as it did for Obama in 2008.

Hello and welcome to our round-the-clock rolling coverage of the 2020 US election. Everyone is looking toward Tuesday, but the election is already happening in a big way, with more than 70m people having voted early so far. That’s more than half of the roughly 130m people who voted for the two major-party candidates in the 2016 election – and we still have six days to go until an election day, when a big vote is also anticipated.

Donald Trump held a trio of rallies yesterday in the midwest, while Joe Biden took a turn through Georgia, an aspirational pickup state for the Democrats. Also out on the campaign trail was Barack Obama, who had this to say about Trump’s constant complaining about the prominence in the headlines of the coronavirus pandemic: “He’s jealous of Covid’s media coverage.”

The Trump campaign account was hacked briefly, and made to read: “the world has enough of the fake news spreaded [sic] daily by president donald j trump”. Federal authorities are investigating. Earlier this autumn Dutch media reported that a researcher gained access to Trump’s twitter account by guessing the password: maga2020!

The outlook in the coronavirus crisis in the United States continues to be dire, with nearly half a million cases recorded in the last week. But the White House issued a document of “Trump administration highlights” in the areas of science and technology – and touted its response to the coronavirus pandemic:

The policies enacted and investments made by the Administration have equipped researchers, health professionals, and many others with the tools to tackle today’s challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and have prepared the Nation for whatever the future holds.

Thank you for joining us today!