A presidential campaign twisted by a criminal prosecution, the removal of an incumbent president from the ticket, and multiple assassination attempts is coming to a final push across a handful of states on the eve of Election Day.
Kamala Harris will spend all of Monday in Pennsylvania, whose 19 electoral votes offer the largest prize among states expected to determine the Electoral College outcome. The vice president and Democratic nominee will visit working-class areas including Allentown and end with a late-night rally in Philadelphia featuring Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.
Donald Trump plans to hold four rallies in three states, starting in Raleigh, North Carolina and making two stops in Pennsylvania with events in Reading and Pittsburgh. The Republican nominee and former president ended his campaign the same way he did the first two, with an event late Monday night in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
About 77 million Americans have already voted early, but Harris and Trump are pushing to rally millions more supporters on Tuesday. Any result on Election Day will lead to a historic result.
Trump’s victory would make him the first new president to be indicted and convicted of a felony, after his trial in New York. He will have the power to terminate other pending federal investigations against him. Trump will also become the second president in history to win non-consecutive terms in the White House, after Grover Cleveland in the late nineteenth century.
Harris is vying to become the first woman, the first black woman and the first person of South Asian descent to reach the Oval Office, four years after she broke the same barriers in national office when she became President Joe Biden’s second-in-command.
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The vice president rose to the top of the Democratic ticket after Biden’s disastrous performance in a debate in June led to his withdrawal from the race. This was just one of a series of convulsions that have plagued this year’s campaign.
Trump escaped by millimeters from an assassin’s bullet during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. His Secret Service unit thwarted a second attempt in September, when a gunman cocked his gun while Trump was playing golf at one of his courses in Florida.
Harris, 60, downplayed the historic nature of her nomination, which only came about after the 81-year-old president ended his re-election bid after his June debate against 78-year-old Trump raised questions about Biden’s age.
Instead, Harris has presented herself as a generational changer, emphasized her support for abortion rights after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to end the constitutional right to abortion services, and regularly pointed to 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 described Trump as a threat to democracy, and late in the campaign embraced the criticism that Trump is accurately described as a “fascist.” “.
As Monday approached, Harris mostly stopped mentioning Trump. She promises to solve problems and seek consensus, while striking an almost exclusively upbeat tone reminiscent of the opening days of her campaign when she embraced the “politics of joy” and her campaign theme of “freedom.”
“From the beginning, our campaign was not about being against something, it was about being for something,” Harris said Sunday evening at Michigan State University.
Trump, who renewed his slogans “Make America Great Again” and “America First,” made his hard-line approach to immigration and harsh criticism of Harris and Biden the basis of his argument for a second administration. He has attacked Democrats for an inflationary economy, vowed to lead an economic “gilded age,” end international conflicts and close the United States’ southern border.
But Trump has often veered into grievances over his impeachment after trying to overturn Biden’s win and repeatedly discrediting the country he wants to lead again as a “failed nation.” And as recently as Sunday, Trump renewed his false claims that the US election was rigged against him, mused about violence against journalists, and said he “shouldn’t have left” the White House in 2021 — dark turns that cast a pall over another anchor in his closing argument. : “Kamala broke it. I’ll fix it.”
The elections are likely to be decided in seven states. Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016, then flipped to Biden in 2020. North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada add the Sun Belt region to the presidential battleground map.
Trump won North Carolina twice and lost Nevada twice. He won Arizona and Georgia in 2016, but saw them slide to the Democrats in 2020.
Harris’ team has shown confidence in recent days, pointing to a large gender gap in early voting data and research showing late-deciding voters have gotten their way. They also believe in the power of their campaign infrastructure. This weekend, Harris’ campaign had more than 90,000 volunteers helping with voter turnout — and knocked on more than 3 million doors across battleground states. However, Harris’s aides insist she remains the underdog.
Trump’s team also expressed confidence, arguing that the former president’s populist appeal would attract younger and working-class voters across racial and ethnic lines. The idea is that Trump is able to put together an unusual Republican coalition, even as other traditional GOP blocs – especially college-educated voters – shift more Democratic.
AP White House correspondent Zeke Miller contributed to this report.
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