Election 2024 live updates: Harris’ ad spending tops Trump by $300 million; DJT stock suddenly soars

The Republican National Committee has sued the Milwaukee Elections Commission, alleging that the number of observers allowed at voting locations in Wisconsin’s biggest city was “arbitrarily” limited.

The number of observers was limited to two people in at least two polling locations, the RNC said in the lawsuit filed in circuit court in Milwaukee County.

While state law allows the number of observers at polling sites to be “reasonably” limited, the RNC argued that there “was no legal basis” to allow so few poll watchers at the sites in question.

“When access is arbitrarily restricted to two persons, it opens the door to fraudulent claims of party affiliation so as to ‘freeze out’ one or the other major party,” the lawsuit stated.

The Milwaukee Election Commission said in a statement to NBC News that it “refutes the claims made by the RNC,” adding that the city “favors the greatest possible transparency during elections,” including “accommodating all observers at election locations.”

The commission also noted that it had been in communication with the RNC and met with the committee Sunday night.

But, the commission said of the RNC, “it seems that filing a lawsuit was their goal all along.”

The commission added that the GOP was never denied an observer during the in-person absentee voting period and will not be denied one on Election Day either.

“Our city attorneys will respond to any lawsuits that are filed,” the commission said.

— Kevin Breuninger

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has seen no evidence of activity that has the potential to materially impact the outcome of the presidential election, Director Jen Easterly told reporters Monday during a briefing.

Easterly said the agency has observed some small-scale incidents during the early voting period, such as severe wet weather and criminal destruction of ballot boxes. She cautioned that disruptions happen in every election, and she expects others will follow in the coming days.

“As we head into tomorrow, I can say with great confidence that our election infrastructure has never been more secure and that the election community has never been better prepared to deliver safe, secure, free and fair elections,” Easterly said.

Easterly encouraged Americans to seek out state and local election officials for the most accurate information about their local proceedings.

—Ashley Capoot

Trump Media shares rapidly shot up as much as 16% in intraday trading.

It’s unclear what prompted the sudden surge. DJT stock was down as much as 8% premarket, and in the first hours of the trading day shares had hovered around even.

Many analysts see the stock as a proxy for pro-Trump retail investors to back the Republican nominee or bet on the presidential election. The company’s performance on the Nasdaq has therefore been viewed as an informal gauge of enthusiasm among Trump supporters.

Trump owns nearly 57% of Trump Media.

Crypto companies have already started donating tens of millions of dollars to a political action committee that is already fundraising for the 2026 election cycle. The pro-crypto and bipartisan super PAC Fairshake said Monday that the committee and its affiliates have raised $78 million for the next midterm elections.

That includes more than $30 million raised, plus $48 million in new commitments from centralized crypto exchange Coinbase and Silicon Valley venture fund Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, and other companies.

Overall, a16z has given $70 million to Fairshake, as the VC looks to support the PAC’s larger mission of building a Congress composed of pro-crypto legislators.

Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, announced it would give an additional $25 million to Fairshake, bringing its total donations to Fairshake and its affiliated PACs up to more than $75 million. The crypto company is currently battling the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over claims that it engaged in unregistered sales of securities.

— MacKenzie Sigalos

Ahead of election day, Americans are sharply divided along racial and gender lines. But the gender gap is becoming the most glaring split, with 57% of women backing Harris and 41% supporting Trump. Among men, 58% are favoring Trump and 20% are backing Harris — a 34-point gender divide, according to the final national NBC News poll.

Harris is also maintaining a large lead among Black voters nationwide, including in the key battleground states. 

A separate Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll released Saturday showed Harris leading Trump in Iowa, which has stayed decidedly to the right in recent elections.

Among likely voters, 56% of women preferred Harris, up from 53% from the same poll in September. Among men, 52% back Trump, down from September’s 59%. Among independent voters, Harris is favored 46% to 39%.

Politically independent female voters now support Harris by a wide margin, along with women over 65. Such strong support among these contingents contribute to the positive news for Harris in the most recent polls.

— Jessica Dickler

Trump said he thanked God for the significant miss in the October jobs report Friday, because it could help him make his case against Harris on the campaign trail.

“We had the worst jobs report in modern history,” Trump said at his rally in North Carolina. “I looked up. I said, ‘Thank you.'”

The U.S. added a mere 12,000 jobs in October, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, well below the Dow Jones estimate of 100,000 and a significant drop from September. It was the weakest pace of growth since late 2020.

Almost immediately, Trump pounced on the downbeat report to help boost his economic pitch to voters.

“I’ve been saying it’s going to happen because of what they’re doing,” Trump said of the Biden administration. “Because they know nothing about economics or business or honestly, they’re stupid people.”

But economists largely view the sharp decline as an anomaly, attributable to temporary shocks including the back-to-back hurricanes in early October and the Boeing strike.

Chief Moody’s economist Mark Zandi called the October report “a head fake.”

“Abstracting from these one-offs,” such as the hurricanes and Boeing strike, Zandi wrote in a Friday post on X, “Employment increased by close to 150k, about the same as the gains in recent months.”

“It is fair to say the job market remains rock-solid,” he added.

— Rebecca Picciotto

A total of 13 states have gained or lost Electoral College votes since the 2020 presidential election, including some battleground states.

The electoral votes are allocated based on the state’s total congressional delegation, which is determined by its population, according to the U.S. Census.

Texas gained two electoral votes. Gaining one vote each were Oregon, Montana, Colorado, North Carolina and Florida.

The U.S. Census Bureau conducts a Census every 10 years. The electoral votes for this year’s election are based on the 2020 Census. The numbers weren’t official in time to be used for that year’s presidential election.

Seven states lost a vote: New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, West Virginia, Illinois and California.

Despite the one-vote loss, California remains the state with the largest share of electoral votes, at 54.

— Ece Yildirim

The total ad spending for Harris’ four-month presidential run was $1.26 billion, far exceeding the $933 million in total ad support for Trump, the ad-tracking firm AdImpact reported.

Nearly $1 billion of all ad spending this cycle came in the last week alone, AdImpact data show.

Harris outpaced Trump in ad support despite having essentially launched her presidential campaign less than four months earlier.

President Joe Biden, who dropped out as the likely Democratic nominee in July, received $321 million in total ad support in the 2024 cycle, per AdImpact.

— Kevin Breuninger

Nikki Haley is urging voters with mixed feelings about Trump to cast their ballots for him anyway.

“I don’t agree with Mr. Trump 100% of the time,” Haley wrote on the last day of the 2024 campaign in The Wall Street Journal. “But I do agree with him most of the time, and I disagree with Ms. Harris nearly all the time. That makes this an easy call.”

In the editorial, Haley said the Biden administration has made “the world far more dangerous” and caused prices to spike for U.S. households. Recently, inflation has cooled from its pandemic peaks, and other data points to a healthy economy.

Haley, a Republican and former governor of South Carolina, dropped her bid for president in March. While she was still in the race, she said in an interview with Craig Melvin, co-host of NBC’s “TODAY,” that Trump was “not the same person he was in 2016” and that he’d become “unhinged” and “more diminished.”

Although Haley said she endorsed Trump at the Republican National Convention in July, she’s been largely absent from his campaign trail.

Some Trump allies think the former president should have campaigned with Haley, who maintains broad support among moderate Republicans, but Trump never warmed to the idea.

— Annie Nova

Trump says if he is elected president, he would impose a 25% tariff on all Mexican imports unless the country enacts stricter border regulations.

If Mexican leaders “don’t stop this onslaught of criminals and drugs coming into our country, I’m going to immediately impose a 25% tariff on everything they send in to the United States of America,” the Republican presidential nominee said at his first rally of the day in Raleigh, North Carolina.

He added that it was the first time he had announced the proposal, though for months, a central plank of his economic platform has been a hardline approach to tariff policy. Trump has floated a 20% tariff rate on all imports from all countries with an especially high 60% rate on China.

Economists and Wall Street analysts view Trump’s hyper-protectionist trade policy as a potential threat to America’s inflation recovery, just as consumer prices have begun to cool from their pandemic-era spikes. In turn, the Harris campaign has branded the tariff plans as the “Trump sales tax.”

— Rebecca Picciotto

The minimum wage in three states could get a bump on Tuesday.

If history is any guide, ballot measures to raise the minimum wage in Alaska, Missouri and California will likely win support from a majority of voters and lead to bigger paychecks for workers, said Sebastian Martinez Hickey, a state economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute.

“Since 2014, 12 states have passed minimum wage increases through ballot measures,” Martinez Hickey told CNBC.

Voters in Alaska will decide if they want to hike the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2027, with adjustments pegged to inflation after that. Ballot Measure No. 1 would raise the minimum wage to $13 in 2025, and to $14 in 2026.

Alaska’s current lowest possible hourly pay is $11.73, so the increase would be significant for those at the bottom of the earning scale.

Proposition A in Missouri, if approved, would gradually increase the minimum wage, with a bump to $13.75 an hour on Jan. 1, 2025, up from the current lowest wage of $12.30. By 2026, the minimum wage would reach $15. Afterward, increases would be based on inflation.

In California, Proposition 32 would increase the minimum wage to $18 from $16. The timeline of that boost would vary by employer size, giving businesses with 25 or fewer workers until 2026 to have to pay that amount.

If the measure is successful, larger employers would need to raise the wage to $18 in 2025, and to $17 for the rest of 2024.

— Annie Nova

IAC Chairman Barry Diller said that if Harris wins the presidency he hopes she will bring conservative billionaire Elon Musk to her administration to cut costs.

“Call him and say ‘You know what, Mr. Musk, you are truly a great cutting executive,'” Diller said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” this morning, before praising Musk’s work at X and calling him “a deserved megalomaniac.”

“‘Come in, help our government. You’ve got absolute authority, cut everywhere,” Diller mused.

Diller also said that he would like to see Harris appoint a Republican with foreign policy experience as secretary of defense.

— Ece Yildirim

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger urged voters to be on the lookout for false or misleading election claims, warning some are coming from foreign sources who want Americans “fighting amongst ourselves.”

Raffensperger, the state’s top elections official, pointed to a recent social media video that showed someone claiming they would vote for Harris multiple times in Georgia.

“It was all made up, and it actually came from Russia,” he said during an election update this morning.

U.S. intelligence officials said Friday that the video was manufactured by “Russian influence actors.”

“So I think we as Americans, we just need to sit back sometime and make sure that you’re really hearing the truth,” Raffensperger said. “Because there’s a lot of bad people out there that want to just kind of get us fighting amongst ourselves.”

“We know who they are. We know Russia, China, Iran. There’s a list of them. It’s a basket full. And they’re just not really our friends. And if they can create us fighting amongst each other, then they feel like they’ve won,” he said.

— Kevin Breuninger

John Paulson told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” this morning that he has seen some internal Trump campaign polling showing that Trump is leading or tied in all the swing states.

The polling was done “outside the campaign” over the weekend, after a surprising poll on Saturday showed Harris leading Trump in Iowa.

“I agree that the race is very tight, but I’m optimistic that [Trump] will win,” Paulson said.

— Ece Yildirim

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is asking people to nominate candidates for positions across a potential Trump administration, according to a post on his Make America Healthy Again website.

The call for nominees is a surprising move from Kennedy, who appears to be at odds with the co-chair of the Trump transition team, Howard Lutnick, over what his potential role might be.

Lutnick recently said Kennedy is not in line for a Cabinet position. “He’s not getting a job for HHS,” Lutnick told CNN’s “The Source,” referring to the Health and Human Services Department. On Sunday, Kennedy told Fox News that Lutnick was wrong, and if Kennedy wanted to be HHS secretary, Trump “would fight like hell to make that happen.”

Still, for Kennedy to be seeking nominees to a potential administration through his own website, and not a Trump campaign site, ahead of the election, is highly unusual. A Trump campaign spokesman did not immediately reply to a request for comment from CNBC about the nomination site.

The Make America Healthy Again site says it is looking for nominees across 12 categories, including health, economy and government efficiency. At the bottom of the page, there is a form to fill out in order to nominate someone. Once a person is nominated, their profile posts to a public website, unless the nominee specifies otherwise.

Kennedy would likely have a role in health in a Trump administration. He previously ran for president this election cycle before dropping out and endorsing Trump.

— Jake Piazza

Shares of Trump Media fluttered up and down in heavy trading on the day before the election.

DJT shares were initially up more than 4% after the market opened at 9:30 a.m. ET. But the stock turned negative shortly after, and was down more than 2% by 9:50 a.m.

Earlier Monday morning, Trump Media stock was down as much as 8% in the premarket.

Many of the company’s retail investors are supporters of the former president, who are buying the stock as a way to back Trump or bet on his odds of winning the election.

Trump owns nearly 57% of the company, which operates the Truth Social platform. Trump Media executives have said that the company would benefit if Trump beats Harris in the election.

— Kevin Breuninger

The new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll that showed Harris leading in Iowa within a margin of error came as a major surprise — even to the pollster that conducted it.

“This was a shock poll,” J. Ann Selzer, the president of the Des Moines-based polling company that conducted the survey, said in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“I’ve been shocked since Tuesday morning last week, so I’ve had the time for this to sink in, because no one, including me, would have thought that Iowa could go for Kamala Harris,” she said.

The poll, which was released Saturday, showed Harris ahead of Trump by 47% to 44%. Though that lead was within the survey’s margin of error of 3.4 percentage points, it was a marked seven-point shift from September. Harris’ edge was partly fueled by a 28-point lead over Trump with independent women voters.

“If you’re a Democrat, you’re really looking at this and hoping that it means something for states like Michigan and Wisconsin that appear to be deadlocked battleground states,” Brianne Pfannenstiel, the Des Moines Register’s chief politics reporter, said on CNN.

— Rebecca Picciotto and Dan Mangan

Top Trump campaign officials acknowledged the possibility that their nominee may not win as they briefed staff about how operations will wrap up after the election.

An internal email, signed by senior advisors Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita and obtained by NBC News, tells campaign staff that their last payroll day is Nov. 30, “regardless of the outcome of the election.”

The message reflects standard procedure for any operation that will soon close its doors, but it is noteworthy when anyone in Trump’s orbit nods to the possibility that he could lose.

If Trump does win, many of the employees will be reassigned to either the Trump-Vance transition team or the president-elect’s inaugural committee, the email says.

Those working at the campaign headquarters in West Palm Beach are advised to clear their work areas of personal belongings by Nov. 10. The space will be converted to handle the transition and inaugural teams, “God-willing,” Wiles and LaCivita write.

“As the campaign comes to a close in a few days, please be proud of the work you have done and the contribution you have made to President Trump and Senator Vance [and their] work on behalf of freedom, security, the financial health of our nation, and to peace around the world,” they write.

“Most of all, be proud that you worked to Make America Great Again.”

— Kevin Breuninger and Jonathan Allen, NBC News

A Philadelphia judge could rule at a hearing underway Monday morning that Elon Musk’s $1 million daily voter lottery should be blocked from continuing — but with just a day before Election Day that might not matter much.

Philadelphia’s district attorney last week sued the Tesla billionaire CEO and his political action committee in the county Common Court of Pleas, accusing them of running an illegal lottery by awarding cash prizes — 16 so far — to registered voters in swing states who signed a petition backing the Constitution.

Musk then got the case briefly transferred to federal court, but District Attorney Larry Krasner nearly as quickly got it returned to the county court.

Musk has said his America PAC would run the giveaway until Election Day, so if Krasner gets the injunction he is seeking from a judge at the hearing, it could save the Trump backer a million dollars or two.

— Dan Mangan

Shares of Trump’s social media company dropped as much as 8% in premarket trading, exacerbating the Truth Social operator’s stock slide just before the election.

Trump Media, which trades as DJT on the Nasdaq, aw its market cap fall more than 40% between Tuesday afternoon and Friday.

The sudden drop erased much of the company’s gains from a massive rally in October, when its share price more than tripled.

Despite its multibillion-dollar valuation, the company has posted net losses of more than $340 million on revenues of less than $2 million this fiscal year.

The frenetic trading around the stock often seems to bear little correlation to its business fundamentals. Rather, analysts see the company as a magnet for pro-Trump retail investors to support the former president and bet on his odds of beating Harris in the election.

Harris will spend her final day on the campaign trail holding rallies across Pennsylvania, a must-win battleground state that both Republican and Democratic strategists see as the key to winning the Oval Office.

Harris will start the day in Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton, before holding a rally in Allentown, then going on to a local stop in Reading. On Monday night, Harris will hold rallies in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. The latter two will feature musical guests, including Lady Gaga in Pittsburgh and Katy Perry in Philadelphia, according to the campaign.

Pennsylvania went for Trump in the 2016 presidential election, but flipped to Joe Biden in 2020. Polls show Harris and Trump neck and neck in the state.

— Jake Piazza

Roughly 76 million Americans have already voted early, both through mail-in and early in-person voting, according to NBC News.

Among the states that record voters’ party alignment, 41% of early voters are registered Democrats and 39% are registered Republicans. Early voting rules differ across states.

— Jake Piazza

Trump will split his time across three battleground states on the final day before the election.

Rallies are planned in Raleigh, North Carolina; Reading, Pennsylvania; Pittsburgh, and Grand Rapids, Michigan, according to the Trump campaign.

Grand Rapids occupies a unique position in Trump campaign history: Michigan’s second-largest city has been Trump’s final stop on election eve in both of his previous presidential campaigns.

— Jake Piazza