Harris and Trump make a furious final push one day before US election
‘It’s ours to lose,’ says a confident Trump at a North Carolina rally; ‘Let’s get this done,’ Harris tells Pennsylvania crowd; polls indicate extremely close presidential race
By Times of Israel
RALEIGH, North Carolina (AP) — 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 about 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.
Trump also held an event in Reading, Pennsylvania — which Harris is also visiting — where he brought some of his children on stage after giving them a shoutout from the podium.
He appeared to get wistful in what was one of his final campaign events of the 2024 election, saying, “This is our last time now, for forever.”
His children Eric, Don Jr. and Tiffany, along with Eric’s wife and Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump and Tiffany’s husband Michael Boulos, all appeared with the Republican presidential candidate on stage.
Trump’s children, as well as Lara, each addressed the crowd, including a rare turn speaking from Tiffany.
“They’re kind people,” Donald Trump said. “They have big hearts. They’re strong. They can be nasty. But they have big hearts, those great children of mine.”
Trump also has a later event in Pittsburgh — 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.
There were plenty of empty seats at the J.S. Dorton Arena, a 5,000-seat venue with additional seating on the floor in the Raleigh arena where Trump kicked off his campaign day. One attendee, Ebony Coots, said she regretted voting for Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 and is now backing Trump — but is nervous about Tuesday’s election.
“You know, actually, I might try to go to another planet,” Coots, a 48-year-old delivery driver, said if Harris were to win.
About 77 million Americans have already 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 survived by millimeters a would-be assassin’s bullet at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. His Secret Service detail foiled a second attempt in September when a gunman had set up a rifle as Trump golfed at one of his courses in Florida.
Harris, 60, has played down the historic nature of her candidacy, which materialized only after the 81-year-old president ended his reelection bid following his June debate against the 78-year-old Trump accentuated questions about Biden’s age.
Instead, Harris has pitched herself as a generational change, emphasized her support for abortion rights after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision ending the constitutional right to abortion services, and regularly noted the former president’s role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
Assembling a coalition ranging from progressives such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney, Harris has called Trump a threat to democracy and late in the campaign even embraced the critique that Trump is accurately described as a “ fascist.”
Heading into Monday, Harris has mostly stopped mentioning Trump by name, calling him instead “the other guy.” She is promising to solve problems and seek consensus, while sounding an almost exclusively optimistic tone reminiscent of her campaign’s opening days when she embraced “the politics of joy” and the campaign theme of “freedom.”
At the vice president’s first stop in Scranton, Pennsylvania, she told the crowd, “Over these next 24 hours, let’s enjoy this moment to knock on a neighbor’s door.”
“Let’s get this done,” Harris said.
Harris also offered some insights into her personal formation as a politician that she doesn’t often divulge. In Scranton, she talked about once being a longshot while running for San Francisco district attorney in 2002 and how she “used to campaign with my ironing board.”
“I’d walk to the front of the grocery store, outside, and I would stand up my ironing board because, you see, an ironing board makes a really great standing desk,” the vice president said, recalling how she would tape her posters to the outside of the board, fill the top with flyers and “require people to talk to me as they walked in and out.”
In Allentown, home to tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans, Harris will hold a rally with rapper Fat Joe. Later, she’s visiting a Puerto Rican restaurant in Reading with Ocasio-Cortez. Both Fat Joe, whose real name is Joseph Cartagena, and Ocasio-Cortez, are of Puerto Rican heritage.
The stops come after a comic at a recent Donald Trump rally suggested that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.”
Standing in line for Harris’ Allentown rally, 54-year-old Ron Kessler, an Air Force veteran and Republican-turned-Democrat, said he plans to vote for just the second time in his life. Kessler said that, for a long time, he didn’t vote, thinking the country “would vote for the correct candidate.”
But “now that I’m older and much more wiser, I believe it’s important, it’s my civic duty. And it’s important that I vote for myself and I vote for the democracy and the country.”
As recently as Sunday, Trump renewed his false claims that US elections are rigged against him, mused about violence against journalists and said he “ shouldn’t have left” the White House in 2021 — dark turns that have overshadowed another anchor of his closing argument: “Kamala broke it. I will fix it.”
The election is likely to be decided across seven states. Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016 only to see them flip to Biden in 2020. North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada add the Sun Belt swath of the presidential battleground map.
Harris’ team has projected confidence in recent days, pointing to a large gender gap in early voting data and research showing late-deciding voters have broken her way. They also believe in the strength of their campaign infrastructure. This weekend, the Harris campaign had more than 90,000 volunteers helping turn out voters — and knocked on more than 3 million doors across the battleground states. Still, Harris aides have insisted she remains the underdog.
Trump’s campaign says it’s feeling confident as well, arguing that the former president’s populist appeal will attract younger and working-class voters across racial and ethnic lines. The campaign believes that Trump will be able to amass an atypical Republican coalition, even as other traditional GOP blocks — notably college-educated voters — become more Democratic.
