Former US president comes to Georgia to support Jon Ossoff for US Senate and Keisha Lance Bottoms for governor

Barack Obama, speaking at a Wednesday campaign rally in suburban Atlanta, offered a closing argument for Democrats in the final week of the midterm election campaign.

“These are not serious people,” he said of Donald Trump and the Republican party. “And we’re all paying the price for their lack of seriousness.”

Obama has been accused of ‘snobbery’ over his Trump diss, as people rush to defend the restaurant chain’s ‘affordable opulence’

Around lunchtime on Tuesday, a Rolls-Royce stopped at the intersection of Beverly Drive and Dayton Way in Beverly Hills, California. Local people in athleisure walked past Balenciaga, Dior and Prada boutiques, as visitors on Hollywood bus tours ogled nearby Rodeo Drive, where Burberry and Louis Vuitton shops meet at a celebrated street corner.

Up the street, across from the upmarket Erewhon grocery store – home to $21 smoothies – a few diners sat outside an American landmark: the Cheesecake Factory.

Both Obama and Trump are on the campaign trail, but only one of them appears to be descending into madness

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Barack Obama versus Donald Trump. It is the presidential election that never happened but has come to define an era of US politics.

Obama is back on the campaign trail for the midterms, still electrifying crowds, earning shouts of “We love you!” and skewering his successor. “What’s up with the gold?” he asked a crowd in Detroit. “I mean, he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” This has, predictably, set off a mini culture war involving questions of elitism and the tastefulness of chain restaurants.

In this episode of Guardian Australia’s US politics podcast, co-hosts Reged Ahmad and Jonathan Yerushalmy talk about Barack Obama’s war of words with Donald Trump, after the former president spoke at a campaign rally in Ohio and compared Trump’s White House changes to the Cheesecake Factory. But how effective is Obama on the Democratic party campaign trail? What are the risks around personal attacks? And how much does Obama’s legacy help or hinder when it comes to the midterms?

Reged and Jonathan also look at the backlash over an attack ad from the campaign of Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, and why some are saying it’s a new low for US politics. Finally, how has the perception of corruption in government become such a key issue for voters on both sides of the aisle?

Former president speaks to crowd of thousands in support of Abdul El-Sayed for US Senate and Democratic ticket

Barack Obama told a Detroit crowd on Saturday that Abdul El-Sayed was “fighting for change, real change, that will get money out of politics and put money in your pocket”, as he threw his weight behind the Democratic Senate candidate and the rest of the ticket on the first day of early voting in Michigan.

Obama said in front of thousands of onlookers at Cass technical high school in Detroit that El-Sayed would “finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act and guarantee quality, affordable healthcare to every single American”.

This live blog is now closed. For more on the rally, read our full report:

• Obama rallies Michigan crowd for El-Sayed, saying he’s ‘fighting for real change’

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Donald Trump voted in West Palm Beach, Florida today, telling reporters at the polls that he voted straight Republican on his ballot. Trump has historically mailed-in his ballot rather than voting in-person.

Speaking from the polling site, Trump defended an ad from Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, his administration’s lawsuit seeking to block certification of the Alaska Senate race if Repubican senator Dan Sullivan loses his race and the war in Iran.

The administration seems intent on stripping the congresswoman of her US citizenship and deporting her. It’s a terrible abuse of power

What do you think it is about Ilhan Omar, exactly, that seems to get under Donald Trump’s tangerine-tinted skin? The president has claimed he has a problem with the progressive Democratic congresswoman because she is “unpatriotic” to the US and “disrespectful … to Israel”. However, the extent of his animus towards Omar, the first Somali American in Congress, suggests there’s more to it. Trump has insisted he is “the least racist person there is anywhere in the world”, so I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that she’s brown and Muslim. Truly, it’s a mystery.

Whatever the reason, Trump’s not a fan. The president has plenty of enemies, but few have been attacked as ferociously and consistently over the years as Omar. He’s called her “garbage”, among other nasty names, suggested (without evidence) that she married her brother, and said she “should be thrown the hell out of our country”. His supporters have echoed his calls to deport Omar, who fled war-torn Somalia as a child and became a naturalised US citizen at 17.