A felony trial, the removal of an incumbent president from the ticket, and multiple attempts on the president’s life have all sped up the presidential campaign. Now, on the eve of Election Day, there is one last push in a few states.
Kamala Harris will spend the entire day Monday in Pennsylvania, which has the most electoral votes of any state projected to decide the outcome of the Electoral College. The vice president and Democratic nominee will tour working-class neighborhoods, including Allentown, before concluding with a late-night Philadelphia rally featuring Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.
Trump has planned four rallies in three states. They will start in Raleigh, North Carolina, and go to Reading and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for two events each. He ends his campaign with an event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, late Monday night, just like he did the last two times he ran for office.
About 77 million Americans have already voted early, but Harris and Trump are trying to get many millions more to the polls on Tuesday. Either way, the outcome of the election will be historic.
If Trump wins, he will be the first president to have been charged with and found guilty of a felony, following his hush-money trial in New York. He will be able to end other federal investigations that are still going on against him. It would also make Trump the second president in history to win two terms in a row, after Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s.
Harris wants to be the first woman, first Black woman, and first person of South Asian descent to hold the Oval Office. This comes four years after she broke national office barriers by becoming Vice President Joe Biden’s second in command.
Biden dropped out of the race after a terrible performance in a June debate, which put the vice president at the top of the Democratic ticket. What happened there was just one of many changes that have happened in this year’s campaign.
At a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a would-be killer shot Trump and missed by millimeters. In September, a second attempt was stopped by his Secret Service detail. A gunman had set up a camp while Trump was golfing at one of his Florida courses.
Harris, who is 60 years old, has played down how historic her campaign is. She only became a candidate after the 81-year-old president dropped his bid for reelection after his debate with Trump, who is 78 years old, brought up questions about Biden’s age.
Instead, Harris has offered herself as a fresh start for a new generation, stressed her support for abortion rights after the Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that women did not have a constitutional right to abortion services, and repeatedly brought up Trump’s role in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
Harris has called Trump a threat to democracy and, late in the campaign, even agreed with the criticism that Trump is a “fascist.” She has built a coalition of supporters that includes progressives like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney.
Harris has mostly stopped talking about Trump since Monday. She says she will solve problems and try to reach an agreement, and her tone is mostly positive, which reminds me of the beginning of her campaign, when she embraced “the politics of joy” and “Freedom” as her theme.
Harris spoke at Michigan State University on Sunday night. “Our campaign has never been about being against something; it’s always been about being for something,” he said.
Trump has renewed his slogans of “Make America Great Again” and “America First.” He has also made his harsh criticisms of Harris and Biden and his strict stance on immigration the main points of his case for a second term.
He’s criticized Democrats for letting the economy get out of hand, and he’s promised to lead an economic “golden age,” end all wars, and secure the southern border of the United States.
But Trump has also often complained about being charged with a crime for trying to overturn Biden’s victory and called the country he wants to lead again a “failed nation.” He made more false claims about how U.S. elections are rigged against him on Sunday, talked about violence against journalists, and said he “shouldn’t have left” the White House in 2021.
These are all dark turns that have made it harder to see another important part of his closing argument: “Kamala broke it.” “I’ll fix it.”
Seven states are likely to decide who wins the election. Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin went to Biden in 2020 after Trump won those states in 2016. The Sun Belt is made up of North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. It is part of the presidential battleground map.
His party lost twice in Nevada and twice in North Carolina. Phoenix and Georgia were his in 2016, but the Democrats took them back in 2020.
In recent days, Harris’s team has been expressing confidence by citing a big gender gap in early voting data and research showing that voters who didn’t decide until the last minute have switched their votes to her opponent.
They also have faith in the strength of their campaign infrastructure. Over 90,000 volunteers worked with the Harris campaign this weekend to get people to the polls. They also knocked on more than 3 million doors in battleground states. But Harris’s staff has said she is still the underdog.
Trump’s team has also shown confidence, saying that the former president’s populist appeal will bring in working-class and younger voters of all races and ethnicities. The idea is that Trump can put together a group of unusually Republican voters while other traditional GOP groups, like voters with college degrees, move toward the Democrats.
