US 2024 election live updates: Harris and Trump pitch to Latino voters as campaign enters final two weeks

Thomas Copeland
Live reporter

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have been battling it out in recent days for the support of undecided voters.

“Polling tells us that there’s a small and
vanishing number of them,” says Dr Thomas Gift, a US politics expert at University College London. But remember, in the states where this election will be won and lost, the margins are just that small. In 2020, Joe Biden won Arizona, a state of 7.4 million people, by 10,000 votes – that’s just 0.1%.

Undecided voters tend to be suburban, socially liberal and economically conservative, says Gift, and they usually don’t show up for every election. And you might not expect it, but many of them are young, adds Professor Peter Trubowitz from the London School of Economics.

“They could easily sit on their hands and not vote,” he warns.

The Harris campaign is trying to woo Polish-American voters over the issue of Ukraine, for example, and Trump has a focus on working class voters in specifically selected Pennsylvania counties using a strategy Trubowitz describes as “micro-targeting”.

“10,000 voters here, 10,000 voters there. They’re going to exercise a lot of influence,” Trubowitz tells the BBC. But both campaigns have to be careful that they don’t forget their established supporters.

Whilst its hard to believe that anyone is still undecided with a fortnight until election day, laughs Trubowitz, both camps know there are votes are still up for grabs.

“And where the undecideds break, they all tend to break in the same direction,” Trubowitz adds.