Trump, Harris make last-ditch plea to voters ahead of Election Day
Former President Trump and Vice President Harris are making their final pitch to voters ahead of Election Day, seeking any last minute advantage with the race essentially a dead heat.
The two candidates are seeking to mobilize their bases and appeal to any remaining undecided voters as polling averages show Trump and Harris separated by less than 3 percentage points in each of the seven battleground states likely to determine Tuesday’s winner.
Harris will spend the entire day in Pennsylvania on Monday, a critical swing state that political watchers say is a must-win if either candidate wants to capture the White House.
Trump, meanwhile, is hitting three battleground states in one day, including two stops in Pennsylvania. He will start the day in North Carolina, then hold two events in Pennsylvania before heading to Michigan for a rally. Trump will have held rallies in North Carolina, a state he narrowly won in 2016 and 2020, each of the final three days of the campaign.
Polls going into election week show a toss up race, shifting to the possibility that the contest could prove to be a photo finish.
An NBC News poll released Sunday showed Trump and Harris tied nationally at 49 percent each. The poll found 48 percent of respondents approved of how Trump handled his presidency, compared to just 41 percent who said they approved of President Biden’s time in office, a sign Harris may face some headwinds.
A New York Times/Siena College poll of battleground states published Sunday similarly showed a tight race.
The poll found Harris leading by 3 points in Nevada, 2 points in North Carolina, 2 points in Wisconsin and 1 point in Georgia. It found Trump ahead by 4 points in Arizona, and the two candidates were tied in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
One shocking poll result came Saturday, when a Des Moines Register poll conducted by gold-standard Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer showed Harris leading in the Hawkeye State by 3 percentage points.
The poll may be an outlier, as an Emerson College poll released the same day showed Trump leading by 10 points in a state he carried in 2020 by 8 percentage points. But the Selzer poll showed Harris with a 20-point lead among women, especially on the issue of abortion, and making major gains among older voters, which, if accurate, would help propel her in other Midwestern states.
Trump and Harris are tied, according to the Decision Desk HQ/The Hill’s aggregate polling. Both candidates are polling at 48.3 percent as of Sunday night.
In the key battleground states, the race is just as tight.
Trump has a 0.5 percentage point lead in Pennsylvania, a 0.4 percentage point lead in Wisconsin, a 1.5 percentage point lead in Nevada, a 1.5 percentage point lead in North Carolina, a 2.1 percentage point lead in Georgia, and a 2.4 percentage point lead in Arizona. Meanwhile, Harris has a 0.3 percentage point lead in Michigan.
Tens of millions of people have already headed to the polls where early voting tallies have broken records in places like the swing states of North Carolina and Georgia.
The two candidates have offered diverging closing messages in the grueling campaign home stretch
Trump has tried to make the case that voters are not better off than they were four years ago when he left the White House and that he can “fix” the economy and the southern border.
But that pitch has been overshadowed by a slew of self-created controversies for his campaign.
A Madison Square Garden rally was marked by crude comments and a racist joke comparing Puerto Rico to an “island of garbage.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an outspoken vaccine skeptic, asserted he’d be given broad authority over health agencies and allowed to review vaccination data. And Trump used violent imagery aimed at Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) that drew major backlash.
Harris has jumped on Trump’s Cheney remarks, calling them “disqualifying.” Her campaign has largely centered on warning voters of a potential second term and encouraging the nation to turn the page to a new political chapter.
She has hammered that message home in the final days of the campaign, calling Trump “unstable” and out for power, claiming that he has an “enemies list” and hammering Trump for suggesting he would use the military against his foes.
The two candidates couldn’t be more different, but in a nation as politically divided as ever, the race is anyone’s to win.
Despite the consistently tightening polls, Republicans feel bullish about Trump’s chances.
“He’s on track to win,” said Sean Spicer, a former press secretary in the Trump White House.
Trump allies point to a strong turnout in early voting, at Trump’s encouragement, and shifts in party voter registration since 2020, as well as public polling that shows the former president in a stronger position than in either of his previous two White House bids at this point in previous cycles.
Trump campaign officials have said internal data has given them cause for optimism as well, and they have argued the former president has more paths to 270 electoral votes than Harris, whose path to victory relies heavily on sweeping the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
But if there is one thing keeping some Trump allies up at night ahead of Election Day, it’s concerns about the campaign’s ground game, particularly in those “blue wall” states. The Trump campaign has relied on unproven outside groups, including one backed by Elon Musk, to lead get out the vote efforts.
“I still think our weak spot is ballot capture,” said one GOP strategist close to the Trump campaign. “In this election we had the better message. We had the majority of top issues in our favor. We had a candidate who people may have settled views about, but the man has 100 percent name ID, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. Pretty much every major metric is going in our direction.”
Meanwhile, the Harris campaign sees early voting as a leg up for them and argued that Trump sowing doubt into the election system in a state like Pennsylvania is a sign he “is clearly worried that he's going to lose the election.”
The Harris campaign argued that the high turnout of Republican voters isn’t an issue for them, suggesting that those voters just switched their “mode” of voting and likely all voted in 2020 on Election Day.
“What we're seeing is that Trump early voting is really being driven by the same voters who have voted for Donald Trump on Election Day in the past. So, they're just shifting the way that they're voting,” said a senior Harris campaign official.
The Harris campaign went into the weekend feeling strong about undecided voters, and polls in the days since show that bloc is casting more votes in her favor than in Trump’s.
“We still also know that there are undecided persuadable voters remaining in the electorate, but we are also seeing in our data that they are breaking to the vice president as we close out this race,” the Harris official said.
Updated at 7:29 a.m. EDT