The presidential campaign in the United States is reduced this Monday to a last effort in a group 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 the territories expected to determine the Electoral College outcome. The vice president and Democratic candidate will visit working-class areas, including Allentown, and will end with a nighttime rally in Philadelphia that will include Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.
Donald Trump plans 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 ends his campaign the same way he ended the first two, with an event Monday night in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
About 77 million Americans have already voted early, a number that is almost half of the 158 million who voted through Election Day in 2020. Harris and Trump are pushing to get many millions more supporters to the polls on Tuesday, the final day of the election, as early voting spreads across much of the United States on Monday.
Either election day result will be a historic result. A victory for Trump would make him the first elected president to be impeached and convicted of a serious crime, following his bribery trial in New York. He would gain the power to end other federal investigations pending 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 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 to the national office by becoming the second to command of President Joe Biden.
The vice president rose to the top of the Democratic ticket after Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June set in motion her withdrawal from the race.
The last days of the campaign
On Sunday, Harris and Trump traveled to political battleground states two days before Tuesday’s national election for a new White House term that begins in January.
Democrat Harris headed to Michigan, in the northern American Midwest, one of seven states where polls show the race is extremely close and the outcome is uncertain. Political math shows that the candidate who wins four or more of the seven battleground states will likely become the country’s 47th president.
Trump headed to three other battleground states, holding rallies in smaller cities where he hopes to achieve big vote counts in rural areas to offset Harris’ expected wide margins in Democratic-dominated cities.
Trump began his day in Lititz, Pennsylvania, before heading to Kinston, North Carolina, in the afternoon and ending with an evening rally in Macon, Georgia.
It was the first day since last Tuesday that the two candidates did not campaign in the same state. The focus on battleground states is so pronounced that on Saturday, their planes shared a stretch of runway in Charlotte, North Carolina, where both candidates held rallies.
Harris attended a church service at an African-American church in Detroit, the center of the American auto industry in Michigan, before heading to stops in Livernois and Pontiac and a rally at Michigan State University in East Lansing in the afternoon.
Both Trump and Harris sought in the final days of the campaign to portray the other as unfit to govern the country for the next four years.
On his social media platform Truth Social, Trump told voters: “All the problems we face can be solved, but now, the fate of our nation is in your hands. On Tuesday, they have to stand up and tell Kamala that they’ve had enough, that they can’t take it anymore, “Kamala Harris, you’re fired!”
At her rallies, Harris has tried to convince voters that she will lower the cost of living, which polls show is the top concern nationwide. He has also characterized Trump as dangerous and erratic and urged Americans to leave behind Trump’s chaotic approach to politics.
“We have a chance in this election to turn the page on a decade in which Donald Trump tried to keep us divided and afraid of each other. We’re done with that,” he said in Charlotte on Saturday.
Trump has maintained that Harris, as acting vice president for nearly four years, should be held accountable for rising consumer prices and the tens of thousands of migrants crossing the Mexican border into the US in recent years. He has portrayed migrants as a major political threat to the country and their presence economically harms state and local governments across the country.
“The only free help you’re going to get is a free ride home,” he said at a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Saturday.
Harris made a surprise appearance on the famous NBC comedy show “Saturday Night Live,” where she met actress Maya Rudolph, her double on the show.
Rudolph told Harris at the end of the sketch: “I’m going to vote for us.”
“Brilliant. “Is there any chance you’re registered in Pennsylvania?” Harris asked, reflecting on the importance of the great eastern state to the national outcome.
“No, I’m not,” Rudolph said.
“Well, it was worth a try,” Harris responded, before the pair uttered the show’s tagline: “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!”
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung downplayed Harris’ appearance on the show, saying, “Kamala Harris has nothing substantial to offer the American people, which is why she’s living out her twisted fantasy of dressing up with her elitist friends on Saturday Night.” Live, while his campaign goes down the drain into darkness. Trump introduced the program during his first campaign for president in 2015.
Last-minute polls show the Harris-Trump race is virtually tied in the battleground states, within the margin of statistical error.
ABC News polls show Trump winning five of the seven battleground states, but The Washington Post says its poll aggregation has Harris ahead in four. The New York Times says Trump is ahead by four, Harris by two, and the race is tied in Pennsylvania.
The importance of disputed states.
The US presidential election is not decided by the national popular vote, but rather through the Electoral College, which turns the election into 50 state-by-state contests, with 48 of the states awarding all of their electoral votes to the winner in those states. Nebraska and Maine allocate theirs by vote count both at the state level and by congressional district.
The number of electoral votes in each state is based on population, so the largest states have the most influence in determining the overall national outcome, and the winner needs 270 of the 538 electoral votes to claim the presidency.
Polls show either Harris or Trump with substantial or comfortable leads in 43 of the states, enough for each to reach 200 electoral votes or more. Unless there is an upset in one of those states, the winner will be decided in the remaining seven battleground states, where both Harris and Trump have held frequent rallies, virtually ignoring the rest of the country for their campaign stops.
Polls in all seven states are easily within the margins of statistical error, leaving the outcome in doubt in all seven.
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