US presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump used the final Saturday before Election Day to wrap up their pitches for the White House in a last-ditch attempt to sway undecided voters in battleground states and stem any eleventh-hour defections.

Clinton, the Democratic nominee, held rallies and events in Florida and Pennsylvania, appealing to women, minorities and millennials. She also added a planned stop in Michigan for Monday, the day before the November 8 election.

More than 33 Americans had already cast their ballots by Friday and there are signs from early returns that Clinton’s presidential hopes have been lifted by a high turnout among Hispanic voters in key states.

Campaigning in Pines, Florida, in the afternoon, Clinton tried to encourage the region’s diverse demographic mix of Hispanic, black, Caribbean and Jewish voters to cast early ballots.

“Here’s what I want you to remember,” she told the crowd. “I want to be the president for everybody: everybody who agrees with me, people who don’t agree with me, people who will vote for me, people who don’t vote for me.”

Republicans have long been concerned that Trump’s hard line on immigration would alienate Hispanic voters, and early indications suggest their fears are warranted.

Nearly 6 million people had already voted in Florida by Saturday morning, and returns from mail-in balloting put Democrats in a small lead of about 7,000 votes, down from their lead of more than 100,000 votes at the same point four years ago.

Pennsylvania does not have early voting, so Clinton is expected to invest more time and energy in that battleground state in the closing days of the campaign.

The former secretary of state will make a stop – her second in recent days — in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Monday, a sign that the race is tightening in unexpected places. The latest poll from the state puts her in the lead by just 4 percentage points, down 3 points from a late October survey.

Trump dashed to four states across three times zones, beginning the day in Tampa, Florida, as part of an intense campaign blitz that also took him to North Carolina, Nevada and Colorado.

His campaign event in Reno, Nevada, briefly erupted in commotion when he was rushed from the stage by Secret Service agents. The candidate had stopped speaking after seeing something suspicious in the audience but appeared back on the stage minutes later.

The Republican presidential candidate has an uphill battle in the state following a boom of early voting by Democrats. Local reports suggest that Trump is currently leading his Democratic rival by two points in Nevada.

The New York businessman has said he would include Democratic strongholds among his final campaign stops in the last two days before the election. He plans to visit Pennsylvania, Michigan and also Minnesota, which has voted Democratic since 1972. Polls show him trailing Clinton by about five points in that state.

Trump’s tight Sunday schedule also includes stops in Iowa and Virginia. Trump’s communications director, Jason Miller, said Saturday that internal polls show many states, including Michigan, Minnesota and New Mexico, are closer than public polls suggest, indicating that a renewed FBI probe of Clinton’s emails is taking its toll on her campaign.

As polls have tightened, Trump has been trying to minimize the risk of any last-minute mistakes by sticking to scripted speeches and his favorite lines of attack against Clinton. “If she ever got into the Oval Office, Hillary and her special interests would rob this country blind,” the real estate tycoon said in North Carolina.

Meanwhile, national polls show a near-even race between the two candidates in the final weekend before Election Day. A McClatchy-Marist poll released on Saturday puts Clinton in the lead with 44 percent support among likely voters while Trump trails closely behind at 43 percent, well within the poll’s margin of error.

Culled from Presstv

Melania Trump, the wife of US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, was paid for modeling jobs in the US before she had legal permission to work in the country, according to documents. She was paid for 10 modeling jobs in 1996 worth $20,056, which was seven weeks before obtaining the necessary documents to legally work in the country, The Associated Press reported Friday, citing accounting ledgers, contracts and related documents.

The details of Melania Trump’s early paid modeling work in the US emerged in the final days of a bitter presidential campaign in which her husband has taken a tough stance on immigration laws and those who violate them. The wife of the Republican presidential nominee, who became a US citizen in 2006, has claimed she arrived in the country legally and never violated the terms of her immigration status. During the presidential campaign, she has cited her story to defend her husband’s hard line on immigration.

Melania Trump has said through an attorney that she first came to the US from Slovenia on August 27, 1996 on a visitor visa and then obtained a work visa on October 18, 1996. Foreigners are not allowed to use a visitor visa to do paid work in the US for American companies. “The documents examined by the AP indicate that the modeling assignments would have been outside the bounds of her visa,” AP reports.

Trump has repeatedly made disparaging remarks about immigrants throughout his campaign, particularly immigrants from Mexico and the Middle East. The race between Trump and Clinton represents a battle between two of the least liked major party candidates in history. Recent surveys have found Clinton and Trump as the most unpopular presidential candidates in decades.

An overwhelming majority of American voters are disgusted by the state of US politics and doubt that either of the two main presidential nominees can unite the country after a historically bitter presidential campaign, according to the final pre-election New York Times/CBS News Poll.

Presstv

Republican and Democratic Parties have made such a mockery of US democracy and electoral process that a majority of Americans want neither candidate to win the November 8 election, asks Myles Hoenig, an American political analyst and activist.

US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s unpopularity among American voters has reached a new high, according to recent polls, putting her on par with her Republican rival Donald Trump. According to the final pre-election New York Times/CBS News Poll released on Thursday, an overwhelming majority of American voters are disgusted by the state of US politics, and most view Trump and Clinton as dishonest.

More than 80 percent of voters say the presidential campaign has left them repulsed rather than excited, the poll found. “Having the two most hated politicians running for president of the US representing the two largest political parties has made a mockery of our democracy and electoral process,” Hoenig told Press TV on Friday. “Hillary Clinton lied and stole her way to the nomination for the Democrats and Trump bullied his way by insulting every interest group in America, including his fellow Republican opponents,” he added.

“For the third parties we have Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, who has been made a laughing stock for his ignorance of foreign policy. His poll numbers are dropping. The other 3rd party candidate is Jill Stein of the Green Party who is seeing an actual rise in her numbers in spite of lies and smears coming from mostly the Democrats, with assistance from the main stream media,” he said.  “That the race is tightening is no surprise. It often happens at this time but the reasons now are not because people are becoming more assured of who they want but more and more disgusted in the choices they have,” he stated.

“Regardless of who wins, and it’s most probable that it’ll be either Clinton or Trump, this country’s nightmare will only begin on Jan 21st, the day after the inauguration. If it’s Clinton one wouldn’t be surprised if the ink on the articles of impeachment isn’t already dried. By then, it’s possible that criminal charges will have been presented to her or that she had received by then a presidential pardon from the outgoing President Obama,” the analyst noted.

“President Ford once said, when he was a leader in the House of Representatives, that impeachment is for whatever the Congress wants it to be. Simply the whiff of impropriety or criminal behavior would make any partisan congressman see that as reason enough for such an article of impeachment. Compound that with an actual indictment and it’s guaranteed,” he said.

The commentator said, “Trump has a different set of problems if he were to be inaugurated in January. His positions are so outlandish that even his own party, which by and large has rejected him, would pounce on anything he does that would jeopardize their chances as a party and individually in the next off-year elections of 2018.”

“We have to look inward as to what kind of nation we are that we have degenerated to the point where a majority of Americans want neither candidate to win,” he said in his concluding remarks.

Culled from Presstv