Trump appears at town hall in Michigan – as it happened

The voter asks what the major threat is to manufacturing in Michigan.

Trump responds, confusingly, by talking about the threat of nuclear weapons.

“You’re not going to care so much about making cars” if that starts to happen, he says.

Trump is asked his first question from someone in the crowd, who starts by noting that he attended one of Trump’s rallies and did not fall asleep or leave early.

Trump is repeating false, unsubstantiated or unprovable claims about Covid, the 7 October attacks in Israel, inflation, the stock market, immigration, the price of oil, and the amount of oil in America.

“This is the world’s longest answer to a question,” he says.

Shortly after taking office in January last year, Sarah Huckabee Sanders launched a powerful salvo in the so-called war on woke being waged by Republicans.

She is from a well-known Republican family. Her father, Mike Huckabee, was Arkansas’s governor for more than a decade, from 1996 to 2007.

She served as Trump’s press secretary for two years.

A refresher on how US presidents are elected:

The popular vote is the overall number of qualified voters who voted for a given candidate: in other words, the number of ballots cast for one candidate or another. The main thing to know about the popular vote is that winning it does not mean you win the presidency. The presidency is won by the candidate who gains the majority of electoral college votes. In other words: the US election is decided by races in individual states. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump received fewer votes than Hillary Clinton but still won the presidency and in 2000, George W Bush received fewer votes than Al Gore but also won.

The electoral college is a group of 538 people, called electors, who officially cast their votes for the US president after citizens have voted. This is a requirement outlined in the US constitution. The electors are chosen by political parties in each of the US’s 50 states ahead of the election.

Different states have different numbers of electoral college votes, with the number decided based on the census. The number of votes is equal to its total congressional delegation: the number of senators plus the number of representatives. While not a state, the District of Columbia – as in Washington DC – is allocated three electoral college votes.

A candidate needs more than half – or at least 270 – of the electoral college votes to win.

In most states, all of the electoral college votes from the state go to the same candidate. The exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, which “allocate two electoral votes to the state popular vote winner, and then one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each congressional district”, according to 270towin.

This post was clarified on 19 September to explain that Maine and Nebraska have a different way of allocating electoral college votes.

Trump is claiming falsely that he “did much better” in 2020 than 2016.

Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump 306-232 in the Electoral College in 2020 and had a 4-point margin in the popular vote.

In 2016, Donald J. Trump won the Electoral College with 304 votes compared to 227 votes for Hillary Clinton, and Trump lost the popular vote.

Trump is being interviewed by Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

She says that Trump will win because America “needs a fighter”. She asks why he wants to be president.

“Thank you everybody. A lot of love in this room. I love you, you love me,” Trump says.

Trump is speaking now in Michigan. He claims that there are 8,000 people in the audience, and the same number “walking away”, who could not get in. This seems unlikely, and Trump has made false claims about his crowd sizes before.

Obama has said Trump is obsessed with the sizes of his crowds.

Trump will speak soon at a town hall with Sarah Huckabee Sanders in the town of Flint, in the swing state of Michigan – which has 15 electoral college votes.

“I support the second amendment,” he says, referring to America’s “right to bear arms”.

Walz is a gun owner and skilled marksman.

“But we don’t get to hide behind that when our first responsibility is to protect children,” he says.