Harris and Trump set for final push ahead of US election day

A campaign that has included a felony trial, an incumbent President being pushed off the Democratic ticket and multiple assassination attempts comes down to one final push across a handful of states.

Ms 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 US Vice President and Democratic nominee will visit working-class areas including Allentown, and her day will end with a late-night rally in Philadelphia that includes star support from Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.

Donald Trump plans four rallies in three states, beginning in Raleigh, North Carolina, and stopping twice in Pennsylvania with events in Reading and Pittsburgh.

The Republican nominee and former president ends his campaign the way he ended his first two, with a late Monday night event in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

About 77 million Americans already have voted early, but Ms Harris and Mr Trump are pushing to turn out many millions more supporters on Tuesday. 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. Mr Trump would also become the second president in history to win non-consecutive White House terms, after Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century.

Ms 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 Mr Biden’s disastrous performance in a debate in June set in motion his withdrawal from the race. That was just one of a series of convulsions that have hit this year’s campaign.

Mr Trump survived a would-be assassin’s bullet by millimetres 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 Mr Trump played golf at one of his courses in Florida.

Ms Harris, 60, has played down the historic nature of her candidacy, which materialised only after the 81-year-old President ended his re-election bid after his June debate against the 78-year-old Mr Trump accentuated questions about Mr Biden’s age.

Instead, Ms Harris has pitched herself as a generational change, emphasised her support for abortion rights after the US 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 like representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to Republican former vice president Dick Cheney, Ms Harris has called Mr Trump a threat to democracy, and late in the campaign even embraced the critique that Mr Trump has been accurately described as a “fascist”.

Heading into Monday, Ms Harris has mostly stopped mentioning Mr Trump. 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 “Freedom”.

“From the very start, our campaign has not been about being against something, it is about being for something,” Ms Harris said on Sunday at Michigan State University.

Mr Trump, renewing his “Make America Great Again” and “America First” slogans, has made his hard-line approach to immigration and withering criticisms of Ms Harris and Mr Biden the anchors of his argument for a second administration.

He has hammered Democrats for an inflationary American economy, and pledged to lead an economic “golden age”, end international conflicts and seal the US southern border.

But Mr Trump also has veered into grievances over being prosecuted after trying to overturn Mr 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 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. Mr Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016 only to see them flip to Mr Biden in 2020. North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada add the Sun Belt swath of the presidential battleground map.

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

Ms 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 three million doors across the battleground states. However, Ms Harris’ aides have insisted she remains the underdog.

Mr Trump’s team has projected confidence, arguing that the former president’s populist appeal will attract younger and working-class voters across racial and ethnic lines.

The idea is that Mr Trump can amass an atypical Republican coalition, even as other traditional Republican sections – notably college-educated voters – become more Democratic.