Joe Biden is warning people who live in the path of Hurricane Milton to heed evacuation orders, saying it could be the “worst storm to hit Florida in over a century”. The president postponed his travel to Angola and Germany as the storm churns eastward, and the White House is stepping up its outreach efforts ahead of what could be the next major disaster to befall the southeast, after Hurricane Helene swept through the region not two weeks ago. Kamala Harris gave a similar warning in an live interview on popular talk show the View, while also outlining her plans to relieve the burden on families who support both children and aging relatives.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

• On the View, Harris was asked what she would do different from Biden. The vice-president initially said nothing, then amended her answer, saying she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet.

• The FBI never acted on tips received about Brett Kavanaugh during his supreme court nomination process, a Democratic senator opposed to the Trump appointee revealed in a report.

• Trump secretly sent Covid-19 testing machines to Vladimir Putin in 2020, and has called the Russian leader as many as seven times since leaving the White House, investigative journalist Bob Woodward has reportedly written in a forthcoming book.

The Guardian’s community team is hoping to hear from undecided voters in the seven swing states this election about their thoughts on the contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

If you vote in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona or Nevada and still haven’t picked a candidate, we have some questions for you, and you can find them below:

Joe Biden issued a dire warning about the severity of Hurricane Milton, saying it could pose a historic threat to Florida.

“The current path is terminated … in the Tampa Bay area and cuts directly across the state, east to west, all the way across the state, with the potential for this storm to both enter Florida as a hurricane and leave Florida as a hurricane on the Atlantic coast,” Biden said at the White House.

“This could be the worst storm to hit Florida in over a century, and God willing, it won’t be but that’s what it’s looking like right now.”

He also added that he had spoken to Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida who yesterday refused a call from Kamala Harris.

“The governor of Florida has been cooperative. He said he’s gotten all that he needs. I talked to him again yesterday, and … I said, ‘No, you’re doing a great job. It’s being all being done,’” Biden said, adding he gave DeSantis his personal phone number.

The president also said he would find another time to travel to Germany and Angola, two trips he postponed as the storm approached.

Kamala Harris has now revisited her answer on the View about whether she would do anything differently than Joe Biden, saying there is one way she would change things up.

“I plan on having a Republican in my cabinet,” Harris said, repeating a promise she has made before. “You asked me, what’s the difference between Joe Biden and me. Well, that will be one of the differences. I’m going to have a Republican because I don’t, I don’t feel burdened by letting pride get in the way of a good idea.”

The answer came as Harris discussed her proposals to help families in the “sandwich generation” better manage the burden of caring for both elderly parents and young children:

There are so many people in our country who are right in the middle. They’re taking care of their kids and they’re taking care of their aging parents, and it’s just almost impossible to do it all, especially if they work. We’re finding that so many are then having to leave their job, which means losing a source of income, not to mention the emotional stress. And so, what I am proposing is that basically, what we will do is allow Medicare to cover in-home health care.

Floridians living in parts of the state where Hurricane Milton is expected to strike should follow recommendations to evacuate, Kamala Harris said in her interview on The View.

She also downplayed the significance of Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s decision yesterday not to take a call from her.

“This hurricane coming to Florida is … predicted to be historic in terms of how serious and devastating it will be. And I urge every and anybody who is watching or has family members in that area, please, please, take seriously your local officials admonition to you. If they’re telling you to evacuate, get your stuff and go,” the vice-president said.

She also remarked on DeSantis’s decision not to speak with her yesterday:

That’s why I called the governor about what Florida has received in terms of impact. We have to have an agreement that, at some point, we all need to work together to combine resources, especially federal, state and local resources around these kinds of disasters. And I think it’s a shame that that hasn’t happened.

Harris added: “When I’m president, I will continue to call him to see what he needs for help.”

Kamala Harris is on the set of long-running talk show the View to give a live interview, her first since becoming the Democratic nominee for president.

Her campaign says the vice-president will elaborate on her policies to support working families afford care for children and older adults. It’s a friendly audience – co-host Whoopi Goldberg introduced Harris as “the next president of the United States”. Harris strode out in a gray suit to Beyonce’s “Freedom”.

We will let you know if she makes news.

Amid reports that Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book would reveal that Donald Trump called Putin as many as seven times after leaving office and secretly sent him Covid-19 testing machines during the pandemic in 2020, the former president’s campaign has issued a flurry of personal attacks against the veteran investigative journalist.

In a statement, the campaign’s communications director Steven Cheung also said Woodward’s reporting was false:

None of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Woodward is an angry, little man and is clearly upset because President Trump is successfully suing him because of the unauthorized publishing of recordings he made previously. President Trump gave him absolutely no access for this trash book that either belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore or used as toilet tissue. Woodward is a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally, and he’s slow, lethargic, incompetent and overall a boring person with no personality.

Joe Biden has put on hold his planned travel to Germany and Angola – which would have been the first visit by an American president to sub-Saharan Africa in nine years – to deal with Hurricane Milton’s expected arrival on the Florida coast, the White House said.

“Given the projected trajectory and strength of Hurricane Milton, President Biden is postponing his upcoming trip to Germany and Angola in order to oversee preparations for and the response to Hurricane Milton, in addition to the ongoing response to the impacts of Hurricane Helene across the Southeast,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.

Milton was upgraded yesterday to a category 5 hurricane, and is set to strike Florida’s vulnerable Tampa area. Here’s more on the preparations for the storm’s arrival, just weeks after Hurricane Helene ravaged a swath of the southeastern United States:

Kamala Harris is leading Donald Trump in Michigan, one of seven battleground states expected to decide the election, The Detroit News and WDIV-TV find in a new poll.

Among 600 likely voters surveyed over four days from 1 October, 46.8% say they would support Harris, and 44.2% are backing Trump. That gives the vice-president a lead of 2.6 percentage points, within the poll’s four-percentage-point margin of error.

While it’s certainly not determinative of who will win the state, this poll is good news for Harris for a couple of reasons. The first is that it gives Harris the strongest lead she or Joe Biden has had all year, and comes after absentee voting began in Michigan on 26 September.

In the most recent similar poll from The News and WDIV-TV, conducted in late August, Trump was beating Harris by 1.2 percentage points, 44.7%-43.5%. In late July, Harris had a narrow lead of 0.3 points, 41.6%-41.3%. And in January, Trump was ahead of Biden by 8.2 points, 46.8%-38.6%.

The data also indicates that the vice-president may have an avenue to overcome defections from Michigan’s Muslim and Arab American community over the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Those communities are particularly large in Michigan, and many voters from those groups, which have leaned Democratic in previous elections, say they will not back Harris because of her involvement with Biden’s military support to Israel.

After two women made allegations of sexual misconduct against Donald Trump’s second nominee to the supreme court, Brett Kavanaugh, the then-president publicly said that he wanted the FBI to investigate those and any other claims against him.

But the Washington Post reports today that a forthcoming report from Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse finds the FBI did not have authorization to fullly investigate the allegations, and that messages phoned into the agency’s tip line about Kavanaugh were sent directly to the White House, and never acted upon.

The Senate, which was controlled at the time by the GOP, wound up confirming Kavanaugh, who has since become part of the court’s conservative supermajority, supporting decisions to overturn Roe v Wade and grant Donald Trump immunity.

Here’s more on the report, from the Post:

The president’s comments came as a surprise to the FBI, according to a new report from a Democratic senator based on previously undisclosed correspondence between the agency and the White House. FBI officials — directed to conduct a very limited inquiry in a week’s time — requested “additional guidance” from the White House, citing the public remarks by Trump and other officials describing a freewheeling investigation. But the White House never authorized the agency to independently probe the sexual misconduct allegations, which Kavanaugh staunchly denied.

The report, which was produced by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a Judiciary Committee member and leading critic of the Kavanaugh confirmation, and provided to The Washington Post ahead of a public release on Tuesday, provides additional evidence of the tight control exercised by the White House over the FBI investigation — despite Trump’s claims to the contrary.

The report found that messages to the FBI tip line regarding Kavanaugh were forwarded directly to the White House and never probed, and that the FBI had no written protocols for the supplemental background investigation ordered by the White House. It notes that the FBI was instructed by the White House to talk to 10 potential witnesses and was not given the leeway to pursue corroborating evidence — the absence of which was cited by senators as they narrowly voted to confirm Kavanaugh, marking a major triumph for the conservative movement and locking in a right-leaning majority that would later overturn the constitutional right to abortion.

Trump ordered the additional inquiry following nationally televised testimony by Christine Blasey Ford that Kavanaugh had groped her and tried to take off her clothes more than three decades earlier, when they were in high school at a party in suburban Maryland. Another accuser, Deborah Ramirez, had come forward in a New Yorker story, saying Kavanaugh had shoved his penis into her face during a dorm party when they were at Yale University in the early 1980s.

“The Congressional report published today confirms what we long suspected: the FBI supplemental investigation of then-nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh was, in fact, a sham effort directed by the Trump White House to silence brave victims and other witnesses who came forward and to hide the truth,” said Blasey Ford’s lawyers, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks.