RALEIGH, North Carolina — A presidential campaign that has unfolded through a felony trial, an outcast president and multiple assassination attempts is boiling down to a final sprint in a handful of states on the eve of Election Day.
Kamala Harris spends Monday in Pennsylvania, whose 19 electoral votes offer the biggest prize among the states expected to determine the Electoral College outcome. The vice president and Democratic candidate will tour working-class neighborhoods, including Allentown, and end with a nighttime rally in Philadelphia featuring Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.
Donald Trump kicked off four rallies in three states by addressing a cheering crowd in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he said, “With North Carolina, I always got it.” »
“It’s ours to lose,” he said.
Trump spoke about his tough immigration policies and listed some of his complaints against his Democratic opponents. He also appeared to reference the video that nearly sank his 2016 campaign, as he expressed amazement at two giant mechanical arms that grabbed Elon Musk’s reusable rocket — “like you were grabbing your beautiful baby “.
“You see, I have improved a lot. Years ago, I would have said something different. But I learned,” Trump said, drawing laughter from the crowd. “I would have been a little more risky.”
The final stages of the 2016 campaign saw the emergence of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by their genitals.
Trump has two stops planned later in Pennsylvania, with events in Reading and Pittsburgh, two areas Harris is also visiting. The Republican candidate and former president is ending his campaign the same way he ended the first two, with a late-night event in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
There were plenty of empty seats at JS Dorton Arena, a 5,000-seat venue with additional floor seats in the Raleigh arena where Trump kicked off his campaign day. One attendee, Ebony Coots, said she regrets voting for Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 and now supports Trump — but is nervous about Tuesday’s election.
“You know, actually, I might try to go to another planet,” said Coots, a 48-year-old delivery driver, if Harris won.
About 77 million Americans have already voted early. Whatever the result on Election Day, it will be a historic result.
A Trump victory would make him the first incoming president to be charged and convicted of a crime, following his secret trial in New York. He will gain the power to end other ongoing federal investigations against him. Trump would also become the second president in history to win non-consecutive terms in the White House, following Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century.
Harris aims to become the first woman, first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to reach the Oval Office — four years after breaking the same barriers to national office by becoming President Joe Biden’s second-in-command.
The vice president rose to the top of the Democratic field after Biden’s disastrous performance in a June debate triggered his withdrawal from the race – one of a series of convulsions that have hit this year’s campaign .
Trump survived a would-be assassin’s bullet by millimeters at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. His Secret Service foiled a second attempt in September, when a gunman set up a rifle while Trump played golf at one of his courses in Florida.
Harris, 60, downplayed the historic nature of her candidacy, which only materialized after the 81-year-old president ended his re-election bid after his June debate against Trump, 78, sharpened questions about Biden’s age.
Instead, Harris presented herself as a generational change, emphasized her support for abortion rights after the 2022 Supreme Court decision ending the constitutional right to abortion services, and regularly emphasized the former president’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Assembling a coalition ranging from progressives such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, Harris called Trump a threat to democracy and, late in the campaign, even embraced the criticism that Trump is accurately described as a “fascist.”
As Monday approached, Harris had mostly stopped mentioning Trump. She promises to solve problems and seek consensus, while striking an almost exclusively optimistic tone that recalls the opening days of her campaign, when she embraced “the politics of joy” and the campaign theme “Freedom “.
In Allentown, where tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans live, Harris will hold a rally with rapper Fat Joe before visiting a Puerto Rican restaurant in Reading with Ocasio-Cortez. Fat Joe, whose real name is Joseph Cartagena, and Ocasio-Cortez, are both of Puerto Rican descent. The stops come after a cartoon at a recent Donald Trump rally suggested Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.”
Trump, renewing his slogans of “Make America Great Again” and “America First,” has made immigration and harsh criticism of Harris and Biden the anchors of his argument for a second administration. He criticized Democrats for an inflationary economy and pledged to lead an economic “golden age,” ending international conflicts and sealing the U.S. southern border.
But Trump has also often veered into grievances about being sued after trying to overturn Biden’s victory and has repeatedly denigrated the country he wants to lead again as a “failed nation.”
As recently as Sunday, he renewed his false claims that the US election was rigged against him, spoke of violence against journalists and said he “should not have left” the White House in 2021 – dark turns that overshadowed another anchor of his closing argument. : “Kamala broke it. I’ll fix it.
The election is expected to take place in seven states. Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016, only to see them turn to Biden in 2020. North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada add the Sun Belt portion of the field map presidential battle.
Trump won North Carolina twice and lost Nevada twice. He won Arizona and Georgia in 2016, but saw them flip to Democrats in 2020.
Harris’ team has projected confidence in recent days, pointing to a significant gender gap in early voting data and research showing that voters who decided late have moved on. They also believe in the strength of their campaign infrastructure. This weekend, the Harris campaign rallied more than 90,000 volunteers to help get out the vote — and knocked on more than 3 million doors in battleground states. Yet Harris’ aides insisted she remained the underdog.
Trump’s campaign also says it is confident, arguing that the former president’s populist appeal will attract younger and working-class voters across racial and ethnic lines. The idea is that Trump can build an atypical Republican coalition, even if other traditional blocs in the Republican Party — notably college-educated voters — become more Democratic.
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Barrow reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Makiya Seminera in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Zeke Miller, Will Weissert and Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this report.
