A ‘very close’ US election is a year away today: What will decide it?

Published

2 years ago

November 6, 2023

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The next US presidential election will take place a year today – and the Democrats think it will be “very close”.

A memo from the party hierarchy is consistent with opinion polls that indicate a close contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the frontrunner to be the Republican nominee.

A poll released on Sunday showed Mr Trump ahead of the president in five key swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

The president led in Wisconsin, according to the poll for the New York Times and Siena College.

Mr Biden, spending a working weekend at his Rehoboth beach house in Delaware, has been briefed on the Israel/Gaza situation by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.

How that conflict and the war in Ukraine play into a year of campaigning will depend on their course and consequences.

Biden’s stewardship of US involvement in international conflict will be but one factor influencing the minds of voters, even if it’s lower down a list of campaign issues than the economy, jobs, abortion and US democracy itself.

Add all of that to the age of the incumbent and questions about infirmity. Opponents of Donald Trump say he faces similar questions.

In terms of the strategy of winning an election, Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, wrote in her election memo that it would mirror the tactics that won in 2020 – to draw a contrast with what she called “MAGA extremism”.

The Make America Great Again movement that once carried Donald Trump to the White House gives him momentum still, in spite of legal travails that see him facing 91 charges across four criminal trials in the coming months.

They come on top of one civil case in which he was found liable for sexual abuse, and another in which he was found liable for fraud, after falsely inflating the value of Trump properties.

What will decide the election outcome?

To explore what might shape the next 12 months, we brought together politicians from both sides of the House of Representatives – Democrat Adam Smith, and Republican Victoria Spartz.

ON ISSUES

Adam Smith: Certainly abortion is a huge issue. The efforts to ban abortion nationwide has certainly motivated a lot of people to vote. That will be a motivating factor. Overall, I think the two biggest issues are going to be the economy and democracy. If Donald Trump is re-elected president, a lot of us are concerned that it will be the end of our democracy and I think people share that concern.

Victoria Spratz: I wish we would spend more time trying to unite and do something good for the country. We’re not dealing with border security. This is a very serious issue. We want to help the rest of the world but we need to keep our republic strong.

ON AGE

Victoria Spratz: People age differently, but I think people can observe and make decisions themselves. Who is much better, who we’ve got, who is affected by age? I don’t have to say, to make a comment on that.

Adam Smith: Trump’s just as old as Biden, like two years short. So age really isn’t a factor in that contest. At this point, I think both Trump and Biden are old, but both of them seem perfectly capable of doing their job. I think it’s the policies that are really going to drive this.

ON INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT

Adam Smith: To be perfectly honest, most elections are about domestic issues. I don’t know that it’s going to have a huge impact. People want to know that there’s stable leadership, but I think they’re going to care a lot more about the economy, about abortion, about the strength of our democracy, about the border. I think those are the issues that are going to drive the election in 2024.

Victoria Spratz: I have to agree that it is going to be a domestic issues. I think Joe Biden has a chance to find common ground on the issues of debt and border security. And it remains to be seen. But if he’s not willing to deal with the domestic issues, I think it’s going to hurt him significantly.

ON TRUMP’S LEGAL TROUBLES

Victoria Spratz: I think American people are getting fed up with that. A lot of his opposition might shoot themselves in the foot and the American people will say “it’s enough” and it actually might help Trump.

Adam Smith: Ultimately. I think it will hurt him. That record is not a good one. Financially, in terms of business, in terms of what he did on the insurrection on January 6, in terms of trying to steal the election in 2020 – I don’t think that helps him in a general election.

ON LEADERSHIP

Victoria Spratz: Trump was much tougher on foreign policy and his toughness brought a lot of deterrence. I think President Biden, he’s not a bad person, but he’s very political. He has very political people around him. So everything is driven by politics. Government takes some backbone and strength. I truly believe we need to have much tougher leadership with dealing with domestic issues, border security, debt and dealing with foreign issues. So, I think Trump would be much stronger if he’s the nominee.

Adam Smith: The greatest strength that the United States of America has – what we have over China and Russia – is our system of partnerships and alliances. And Trump, while he was president, tried to break up pretty much every single one of those. He wanted us out of NATO. He wanted us to stop supporting South Korea. He wanted us to be “America First” and push the rest of the world away. I think that makes it more dangerous, not less.

Watch the Republican presidential primary debate live on Sky News next Thursday: Tune in from midnight on Sky News Freeview channel 233 or stream on the Sky News App or YouTube (outside the US)

US

‘Ukraine can’t win war,’ says Trump – as reports emerge of another tumultuous meeting with Zelenskyy

Published

29 mins ago

October 20, 2025

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'Ukraine can't win war,' says Trump - as reports emerge of another tumultuous meeting with Zelenskyy

Donald Trump has said he doesn’t think Ukraine can win the war against Russia – as reports emerge of a less-than-harmonious meeting between the US president and Volodymyr Zelenskyy .

Asked about the conflict by a journalist during a visit to the White House by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the Mr Trump responded bluntly: “I don’t think they will,” before adding: “They could still win it, I never said they would win it… War is a very strange thing, a lot of bad things happen.”

It is a marked change from his comments a few weeks ago at a UN gathering in New York where he said Ukraine could retake “all of its territory”.

And it comes after the Financial Times claimed the behind-the-scenes of Mr Trump and President Zelenskyy’s meeting in Washington on Friday had descended into a “shouting match”.

According to the paper, the US president repeatedly told his Ukrainian counterpart to accept Vladimir Putin‘s terms for ending the war – warning him that the Russian leader would “destroy” Ukraine if it did not agree.

Mr Zelenskyy later attempted to pour water over the suggestions, saying their meeting was “positive” and that Ukraine was preparing a contract to buy 25 Patriot air defence systems as a result of their talks.

However, Mr Zelenskyy said he did not secure the Tomahawk missiles he had wanted for Ukraine. The long-range missiles would have been a major boost for Kyiv.

“In my opinion, he does not want an escalation with the Russians until he meets with them,” Mr Zelenskyy said.

Meanwhile, Hungary’s foreign minister Peter Szijarto has announced he will visit Washington on Tuesday. It follows claims from Mr Trump that he would meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest soon.

And on Monday, US secretary of state Marco Rubio had a phone call with Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.

According to the state department, Mr Rubio and Mr Lavrov spoke about possible concrete steps to implement understandings reached during the call between Mr Trump and Mr Putin last week.

Mr Rubio had, a statement said, also “emphasised the importance of upcoming engagements as an opportunity for Moscow and Washington to collaborate on advancing a durable resolution of the Russia-Ukraine war, in line with President Trump’s vision”.

Also on Monday, French president Emmanuel Macron announced there will be a meeting of the coalition of the willing in London on Friday which Mr Zelenskyy will attend.

The coalition – co-chaired by Sir Keir Starmer, Mr Macron and Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz – has the aim of bringing countries together to protect a peace deal in Ukraine.

US

What’s affected by internet outage – all we know so far

Published

13 hours ago

October 20, 2025

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What's affected by internet outage - all we know so far

Dozens of websites, banks and apps are being affected by a major internet outage.

The problem, which started on Monday morning, appears to be related to an issue at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

As of 9.20am, there were more than 2,000 reports of the Amazon Web Services outage in the US alone, according to Downdetector, which monitors issues and outages in real-time.

Follow live updates here

On its service status page, the company said it was seeing “increased error rates” and delays with “multiple AWS services”.

Here’s what we know so far.

What has been affected?

Multiple banks, the HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) website, mobile phone networks and video-chatting platform Zoom are among the websites having technical issues.

All Amazon products – including Prime Video and Amazon Music – have also been affected, as well as the main Amazon website.

Here’s a full list of what has been affected by the internet outage, according to Downdetector:

• Snapchat
• Ring
• Roblox
• Amazon Web Services
• Life360
• My Fitness Pal
• Amazon
• Xero
• Signal
• Canva
• Fortnite
• Blink Security
• Zoom
• HMRC
• Clash Royale
• Clash Of Clans
• Asana
• Wordle
• Slack
• Smartsheet
• Epic Games Store
• Duolingo
• Amazon Alexa
• Jira
• Vodafone
• Tidal
• Coinbase
• Atlassian
• IMDB
• Amazon Prime Video
• Pokemon Go
• BT
• Peloton
• EE
• Ancestry
• Square
• Playstation Network
• Eventbrite
• Amazon Music
• Sky
• Flickr
• Hay Day
• Rocket League
• Perplexity AI
• Dead By Daylight
• Bank Of Scotland
• Lloyds Bank
• Halifax

What has AWS said?

AWS confirmed it was suffering from “increased error rates and latencies” for multiple services.

What is Amazon Web Services?

Mickey Carroll

Science and technology reporter

Amazon Web Services was named as the cause of the problem by the chief executive of AI company Perplexity.

Aravind Srinivas posted on X saying: “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”

AWS describes itself as “the world’s most comprehensive” cloud service.

It offers companies a virtual backbone, giving them access to servers, databases and storage without having to build their own infrastructure.

Millions of businesses are thought to use AWS, so when something goes wrong, it can have a huge impact. AWS hasn’t put out any information on the outage. Sky News has contacted the company for comment.

In a statement on its website, the company said: “We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause,” an update on its website says.

“We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share.”

The company is posting regular updates on the situation and said its engineers were “immediately engaged” as soon as they spotted the issue.

Concentrated in the US

ThousandEyes, a website that tracks the performance of local and wide area networks, servers and applications, shows many of the outages appear to be concentrated in the US.

A large portion is focused in Virginia, which is widely considered as the global capital for data centres.

Has something like this happened before?

US

Donald Trump mocks ‘No Kings’ protests with AI video of himself dropping brown sludge on protesters from jet

Published

1 day ago

October 19, 2025

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Donald Trump mocks 'No Kings' protests with AI video of himself dropping brown sludge on protesters from jet

Donald Trump has responded to so-called “No Kings” rallies with an AI video of himself in a fighter jet, pouring brown sludge over protesters.

Millions of people were expected to take part in the demonstrations this weekend – the second such gathering after an initial nationwide day of protest in June coinciding with the US president’s birthday.

The term “No Kings” reflects the belief by some that Mr Trump is behaving like a “king” and some in his administration are depicting him as a monarch.

On Sunday, the president shared the AI video on his social media platform, Truth Social.

In the clip, an AI-generated version of Mr Trump is wearing a crown and sitting in a jet with “King Trump” written across it, to the soundtrack of Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone, from the film Top Gun.

The jet then drops thick brown sludge on to AI-generated protesters.

Supporters say the marches are a patriotic defence of free speech, while critics are calling them anti-American.

Mr Trump’s Republican Party has dismissed the demonstrations as “Hate America” rallies.

Many of the events featured marching bands, huge banners and signs, as well as effigies of the president and demonstrators wearing inflatable costumes.

The protests follow Mr Trump’s return to the White House and come against the backdrop of a government shutdown which has closed federal programmes and services.

There has also been criticism of what some see as an aggressive executive, confronting Congress and the courts, in ways that protest organisers believe are a slide toward authoritarianism.

So far, the atmosphere at most of the protests appears to have been largely energetic and upbeat, with protesters calling for accountability and protections for civil liberties.

Organisers said events would be peaceful – a direct response to Republican and Trump administration claims that the protests could be unsafe.