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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will make a furious push on the last day before Election Day
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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will make a furious push on the last day before Election Day

The presidential campaign is coming down to a final push in a handful of states on the eve of Election Day.

WASHINGTON – A presidential campaign that has endured a felony trial, a sitting president being booted from the ticket and multiple assassination attempts comes down to a final push in a handful 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 states 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 featuring 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 I have already voted early, but Harris and Trump are pushing to gain many millions more supporters on Tuesday. Either outcome on Election Day will yield a historic result.

A victory for Trump would make him the first incoming president to be charged and convicted of a serious crime, following his secret trial in New York. He will 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 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 prompted his withdrawal from the race. That was just one of a series of upheavals that have plagued this year’s campaign.

Trump narrowly survived a would-be assassin’s bullet at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. His Secret Service team thwarted a second attempt in September when a gunman planted a rifle while Trump played golf at one of his courses in Florida.

Harris, 60, has downplayed the historic nature of her candidacy, which came to fruition only after the 81-year-old president ended his reelection bid after his June debate against Trump, 78, , will accentuate questions about Biden’s age.

Instead, Harris presented herself as a generational shift, emphasizing her support for abortion rights after the 2022 Supreme Court decision that ended the constitutional right to abortion services and regularly highlighting the former president’s role in the attack on January 6 to the United States Capitol. Forming a coalition that includes everyone 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 late in the campaign even embraced criticism that he describes himself with Accusation of Trump as a “fascist.” .”

Heading into Monday, Harris all but stopped mentioning Trump. She promises to solve problems and seek consensus, while conveying an almost exclusively optimistic tone reminiscent of the early days of her campaign, when she embraced “the politics of joy” and the campaign theme “Freedom.”

“From the beginning, our campaign has not been about being against something, but about being for something,” Harris said Sunday afternoon at Michigan State University.

Trump, renewing his “Make America Great Again” and “America First” slogans, has made his hardline approach to immigration and his withering criticism of Harris and Biden the foundation of his argument for a second administration. He has criticized Democrats for an inflationary economy and has pledged to lead an economic “golden age,” end international conflicts and seal the U.S. southern border.

But Trump has also often pivoted to complaints about being prosecuted after trying to overturn Biden’s victory and 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 is rigged against him, reflected on violence against journalists and said he “should not have left” the White House in 2021 – dark turns that have overshadowed another anchor of his final argument. : “Kamala broke it. “I’ll fix it.”

The elections are likely to be decided in seven states. Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016, only to see them pass to Biden in 2020. North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada add the Sun Belt to the presidential battleground map.

Trump won North Carolina twice and lost Nevada twice. He won Arizona and Georgia in 2016, but saw them flip to the Democrats in 2020.

Harris’ team has projected confidence in recent days, pointing to a large gender gap in early voting data and research showing that late voters have broken through. They also believe in the strength of their campaign infrastructure. This weekend, Harris’ campaign had more than 90,000 volunteers help turn out voters and knock on more than 3 million doors in battleground states. Still, Harris’ advisers have insisted that she remains the underdog.

Trump’s team has also projected confidence, arguing that the former president’s populist appeal will appeal to younger and working-class voters across racial and ethnic lines. The idea is that Trump can form an atypical Republican coalition, even as other traditional blocs of the GOP (particularly college-educated voters) become more Democratic.

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AP White House correspondent Zeke Miller contributed to this report.