A presidential campaign that has seen a felony trial, an incumbent president removed from the ticket, and multiple assassination attempts comes down to a last dash across a handful of states on Election Day eve.
Kamala Harris is spending Monday in Pennsylvania, which has the most electoral votes among the states expected to decide the Electoral College outcome. The vice president and Democratic nominee will visit working-class neighborhoods, including Allentown, before concluding with a late-night Philadelphia rally featuring Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.
Donald Trump has four rallies in three states, beginning in Raleigh, North Carolina and stopping twice in Pennsylvania with events in Reading and Pittsburgh, both areas Harris is also visiting Monday. The Republican nominee and former president ends his campaign the way he ended the first two, with a late Monday night event in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
There were plenty of empty seats at the J.S. Dorton Arena, a 5,000-seat venue with additional seating on the floor in the Raleigh arena where Trump was kicking of his campaign day. One attendee, Ebony Coots, said she regretted voting for Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 and is now backing Trump – but is nervous about Tuesday’s election.
“You know, actually, I might try to go to another planet,” Coots, a 48-year-old delivery driver, said if Harris were to win.
Approximately 77 million Americans have already voted early. Either result on Election Day will be historic.
If Trump wins, he will be the first incoming president to be prosecuted and convicted of a felony, following his hush-money trial in New York. He will get the authority to close other federal investigations against him. Trump would also become the second president in history to win non-consecutive White House terms, succeeding Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s.
Harris is vying to become the first woman, Black woman, and person of South Asian origin to hold the presidency, four years after breaking the same barriers in national office as President Joe Biden’s second-in-command.
The vice president rose to the top of the Democratic ticket after Biden’s terrible performance in a June debate triggered his withdrawal from the race, one of several convulsions that have rocked this year’s campaign.
Trump survived by millimeters a would-be assassin’s bullet at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. His Secret Service detail foiled a second attempt in September when a gunman had set up a rifle as Trump golfed at one of his courses in Florida.
Harris, 60, has played down the historic nature of her candidacy, which materialized only after the 81-year-old president ended his reelection bid after his June debate against the 78-year-old Trump accentuated questions about Biden’s age.
Instead, Harris has pitched herself as a generational change, emphasized her support for abortion rights after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision ending the constitutional right to abortion services, and regularly noted the former president’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Assembling a coalition ranging from progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney, Harris has called Trump a threat to democracy and late in the campaign even embraced the critique that Trump is accurately described as a “ fascist.”
Heading into Monday, Harris has mostly stopped mentioning Trump. She is promising to solve problems and seek consensus, while sounding an almost exclusively optimistic tone reminiscent of her campaign’s opening days when she embraced “the politics of joy” and the campaign theme “Freedom.”
“From the very start, our campaign has not been about being against something, it is about being for something,” Harris said Sunday evening at Michigan State University.
In Allentown, home to tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans, Harris will hold a rally with rapper Fat Joe before visiting a Puerto Rican restaurant in Reading with Ocasio-Cortez. Both Fat Joe, whose real name is Joseph Cartagena, and Ocasio-Cortez, are of Puerto Rican heritage. The stops come after a comic at a recent Donald Trump rally suggested that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.”
The former president, renewing his “Make America Great Again” and “America First” slogans, has made his hard-line approach to immigration and withering criticisms of Harris and Biden the anchors of his argument for a second administration. He’s hammered Democrats for an inflationary economy, and he’s pledged to lead an economic “golden age,” end international conflicts and seal the U.S. southern border.
But Trump also has veered often into grievances over being prosecuted after trying to overturn Biden’s victory and repeatedly denigrated the country he wants to lead again as a “failed nation.”
As recently as Sunday, he renewed his false claims that U.S. elections are rigged against him, mused about violence against journalists and said he “ shouldn’t have left” the White House in 2021 – dark turns that have overshadowed another anchor of his closing argument: “Kamala broke it. I will fix it.”
The election is likely to be determined in seven states. Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2016, but they flipped to Biden in 2020. North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada complete the Sun Belt portion of the presidential battleground map.
Trump won North Carolina twice and lost Nevada twice. He won Arizona and Georgia in 2016 but saw them slip to Democrats in 2020.
Harris’ team has projected confidence in recent days, pointing to a large gender gap in early voting data and research showing late-deciding voters have broken her way. They also believe in the strength of their campaign infrastructure. This weekend, the Harris campaign had more than 90,000 volunteers helping turn out voters – and knocked on more than 3 million doors across the battleground states. Still, Harris aides have insisted she remains the underdog.
Trump’s campaign team has also expressed confidence, claiming that the former president’s populist approach will appeal to voters of all races and ethnicities, including young people and the working class. The notion is that Trump can build an unusual Republican coalition as other conventional GOP constituencies, particularly college-educated voters, grow more Democratic.
