Donald Trump’s ‘increasingly unstable and unhinged’ behaviour is providing fodder for Kamala Harris as they enter the final stretch.

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With less than three weeks until election day, early voting is under way across the US, including in most of the battleground states that will decide the election. States decide their own set of voting rules, so “early voting” means something different in each state: in pivotal Pennsylvania they’ve started collating mail-in and absentee ballots, while in Georgia, in-person voting has just started – and is already breaking records. More than 300,000 people voted in Georgia on Wednesday, 123% more than the previous day-one record. Getting high numbers of supporters to vote early is an important strategy for electoral campaigns, allowing them to bank votes and focus their limited resources on people who haven’t yet cast their ballot.

While the Democratic Party always encourages supporters to vote before election day, Republicans’ attitude to early voting is more complicated. Donald Trump regularly claims, without evidence, that postal voting and ballot dropboxes are vulnerable to tampering, and the Republican National Committee has joined a number of lawsuits aimed at making early voting harder. At the same time, however, Trump’s campaign is encouraging supporters to vote early, aware that it’s a valuable part of get-out-the-vote efforts. There’s a reason for the GOP’s apparent mixed messaging, says the New York Times’ Nick Corasaniti (paywalled). “They want to expand the early vote universe within their base, but, right now, mail voting is mostly dominated by Democrats… So, if Republicans’ litigation strategy ends up invalidating some of those mail votes, it’s likely to hurt more Democrats than Republicans.” An NBC poll found that just over half of all voters plan to vote before election day, and Harris has a 17-point lead among those who plan to vote early or have already done so.

A coin flip contest where gender will be a key factor

While individual polls vary, election forecasters agree: this race is essentially a dead heat. As of October 17, polling guru Nate Silver’s model had Trump and Harris at 50/50, while his former colleagues at 538 give Harris a slight edge, winning a simulated election 53 times out of 100. The New York Times poll tracker (paywalled) shows the candidates less than a percentage point apart in five of the seven battleground states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina), and within two points of each other in the other two, Pennsylvania and Arizona – though still well within the margin of error.

Diving into the polling crosstabs reveals some small but vital changes in voting intention since 2020. There’s been a slight erosion in Democratic support among Black and Latino voters, while the gender gap between the two parties is growing ever larger – women are far more likely to be voting for Harris, and men for Trump. The gap is particularly wide among Gen Z. A survey released last month found that the gender divide among young voters in this election is twice as large as it is overall. Over the last few weeks the candidates have tried to shore up that support with interviews targeted at young male and female voters, perhaps most notably Harris’s appearance on the huge Call Her Daddy podcast. For Trump, courting young men is part of an overall strategy of doubling down on energising his base, rather than trying to persuade undecided voters. It’s a “precarious strategy considering the groups he’s targeting are already low-propensity voters”, writes Brian Tyler Cohen on MSNBC, “made even more precarious by the fact that he’s not exactly giving them a clear reason to turn out”.

Harris warns of threat of second Trump presidency

In the weeks following the Democratic convention, Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, were widely criticised by left-leaning commentators for not building on their momentum with a barrage of media appearances and public events. That’s all changed now, with Harris and Walz criss-crossing the swing states in a packed schedule of town halls, campaign rallies and radio interviews. Walz is set to appear today with former president Bill Clinton in North Carolina, and on Wednesday in Wisconsin with Barack Obama. Meanwhile Harris is trying to appeal to wavering Trump supporters with a (contentious) interview with Fox News’ Brett Baier and, it’s rumoured, an appearance soon with Joe Rogan, America’s most popular podcaster. Harris’s message is increasingly centred on the threat to democracy posed by Trump, a turn from the upbeat approach of the campaign’s early days when the focus was on freedom and change. At a rally on Tuesday she played clips of Trump calling his opponents the “enemy within”, arguing that it signalled that he was “increasingly unstable and unhinged”.

That apparent instability was on full display earlier this week at a bizarre town hall during which Trump abandoned the question and answer session for an impromptu listening party. As the others on stage looked on awkwardly, Trump “swayed and bopped” for a full 39 minutes to a playlist of his favourite tunes, including ‘YMCA’, ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘Hallelujah’. Reports the Washington Post (paywalled): “Some in the crowd began to leave. Some looked around, wondering whether he was done speaking for the night and how much longer the dance – or sway – session would last.” It was “the latest, and strangest, example of Trump showing clear signs of mental decline, even as he insists otherwise”, the New Republic’s Hafiz Rashid wrote. That impression was reinforced when Trump pulled out of a CNBC interview the following day, having already withdrawn from a major 60 Minutes interview – a rite of passage for presidential candidates for half a century – two weeks ago.

‘Clear signs of mental decline’

Concerns about Trump’s mental acuity have increased in recent months as his rhetoric has grown even darker – and more meandering – than usual. Following the former president’s embarrassing performance in the debate against Harris, psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman wrote in the Atlantic that he was showing a number of symptoms of dementia. “If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness.”