A presidential campaign that has careened through a felony trial, an incumbent president being pushed off the ticket and multiple assassination attempts comes down to a final sprint across a handful of states on Election Day eve.
Kamala Harris is spending Monday in Pennsylvania, whose 19 electoral votes offer the largest prize among the 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 Philadelphia rally that includes Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.
Donald Trump kicked off four rallies across three states by addressing a roaring crowd in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he declared: “With North Carolina, I’ve always gotten there.”
“It’s ours to lose,” he said.
Trump spoke on his tough immigration policies and ticked through some of his complaints on his Democratic opponents. He also seemed to reference the video that nearly sank his 2016 campaign as he expressed amazement at two giant mechanical arms that caught Elon Musk’s reusable rocket — “like you grab your beautiful baby.”
“See, I’ve gotten much better. Years ago, I would have said something else. But I’ve learned,” Trump said, prompting laughs from the crowd. “I would have been a little bit more risqué.”
The late stages of the 2016 campaign saw the surfacing of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by their genitals.
About 77 million Americans already have voted early. Either result on Election Day will yield a historic outcome.
A Trump victory would make him the first incoming president to have been indicted and convicted of a felony, after his hush-money trial in New York. He will gain the power to end other federal investigations pending against him. Trump would also become only the second president in history to win non-consecutive White House terms, after Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century.
Harris is vying to become the first woman, first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to reach the Oval Office — four years after she broke the same barriers in national office by becoming President Joe Biden’s second in command.
The vice president ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket after Biden’s disastrous performance in a June debate set into motion his withdrawal from the race — one of a series of convulsions that have hit this year’s campaign.
Trump has later events in Reading, Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh — both of which Harris is also visiting. The Republican nominee and former president ends his campaign the way he ended the first two, with a late-night event in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Harris, 60, has pitched herself as a generational change from 81-year-old Biden and Trump, who is 78. She’s emphasized her support for abortion rights after the 2022 Supreme Court decision that ended the constitutional right to abortion services, and she has regularly noted the former president’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
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