WASHINGTON — A presidential campaign that unraveled through a felony trial, an incumbent president removed from his ticket and multiple assassination attempts is boiling down to a final push in a handful of states on the eve of Election Day .
Kamala Harris will spend all day 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 is planning four rallies in three states, starting in Raleigh, North Carolina, and stopping twice in Pennsylvania, with events in Reading and Pittsburgh. The Republican candidate and former president is ending his campaign the same way he ended 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 working to secure millions more supporters Tuesday. 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 ticket after Biden’s disastrous performance in a June debate triggered his withdrawal from the race. It’s just one of many 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 planted 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 like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, Harris has called Trump a threat to democracy and even, late in the campaign, embraced 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 “.
“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, renewing his slogans of “Make America Great Again” and “America First,” has made his hardline approach to immigration and his harsh criticism of Harris and Biden the anchors of his argument for of 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 team has also projected confidence, arguing that the former president’s populist appeal will attract younger and working-class voters across racial and ethnic divides. 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.
Originally published:
