The tumultuous 2024 U.S. presidential campaign is in its final hours Monday, with Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump traveling to key political battleground states, in a contest that polls indicate is too close to call.   

Both Harris, the Democratic candidate, and Trump, her Republican challenger, are making multiple stops in Pennsylvania, the eastern Rust Belt state that is the biggest electoral prize among the seven battleground states that are likely to determine the national outcome.   

Both candidates are staging rallies in Pittsburgh, the heart of the U.S. steel-making region. Trump is also heading to Reading, a smaller city in eastern Pennsylvania, bookended by a stop in Raleigh, the capital of the mid-Atlantic state of North Carolina, and closing out his day with an evening rally in the Republican stronghold of Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the former president also concluded his 2016 and 2020 runs for the White House.  

Harris is spending the entire day in Pennsylvania, starting in Scranton, the hometown of President Joe Biden, the Democrat she replaced at the top of the party’s ticket in July when he dropped out of the contest after a poor debate performance against Trump and falling poll numbers.   

The vice president is ending the day with a major rally in Philadelphia, the country’s 6th biggest city and a major Democratic stronghold. Pop star Lady Gaga, other musical groups and former talk show host Oprah Winfrey are accompanying Harris to voice their support. 

Harris is also spending part of her day campaigning in majority-Latino Allentown, then, like Trump, also stopping in 95,000-resident Reading, where 70% of the residents are Latino, most of them Puerto Rican.  

Trump will come face to face in Reading with anger over a joke comic Tony Hinchcliffe told at a New York rally of his last week that characterized the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” In response, Trump said a day later he did not hear the joke but made no attempt to disown it, although his campaign said it was not reflective of his views. 

Harris, meanwhile, produced a blueprint to upgrade the island’s hurricane-damaged electrical grid and her campaign says that late-deciding Hispanic voters are casting ballots for her partly because of their resentment over the Puerto Rico putdown.  

In her first stop of the day in Scranton, Harris buoyed campaign workers heading out to knock on doors to identify people likely to vote for her and persuade the undecided. 

“Let’s get to work,” she said. “Twenty-four hours to go.” 

In Raleigh, Trump renewed his attacks on migrants crossing the Mexican border into the United States, threatening Mexico with a hefty tariff on all imports as a strategy to curb illegal immigration. 

“If they don’t stop this onslaught of criminals and drugs coming into our country, I’m going to immediately impose a 25% tariff on everything they send into the United States of America,” he said.  

As the 2024 campaign for a new four-year term in the White House starting in January heads to Tuesday’s official Election Day, more than 80 million Americans have already voted, either in person at polling stations or by mail.   

The total, as early voting ends Monday in some states and has already ended in other places, is more than half the 158 million who voted in the 2020 election, when Biden defeated Trump. It was a Democratic victory that to this day Trump says he was cheated out of by fraudulent voting rules and vote counts.  

Dozens of court decisions, often rendered by Trump-appointed judges, went against him. But Sunday, he told a Pennsylvania rally he “shouldn’t have left” the White House in 2021 when Biden assumed office.   

And, as he reflected on enhanced security necessitated at his rally sites by two assassination attempts on him during the campaign this year, he suggested that he would not mind whether reporters — purveyors of “fake news,” in his view — were shot at.  

Trump has said he will only accept Tuesday’s outcome if he concludes that the election is conducted fairly, which Democratic critics have said they assume means only if he wins. Both Trump and Harris have assembled vast teams of lawyers to contest voting and vote-counting issues as they materialize Tuesday during the day, into the evening and the following days, until a clear winner emerges.

Both candidates are expressing optimism about the outcome.  

Trump says he will win in a landslide, an outcome that would make him only the second president to serve two non-consecutive terms, after Grover Cleveland in the 1880s. He would also be the first felon to serve as president as he awaits sentencing later in November after being convicted of 34 charges linked to his hush money payment to a porn film star ahead of his successful 2016 run for the presidency.   

Trump has often punctuated his campaign with angry broadsides at his Democratic opponents, calling them the “enemy within” the country and a threat to the country’s future. He has belittled Harris as a person of limited intellect and said she would be the pawn of other world leaders in dealing with international relationships.   

Harris for weeks has claimed she is the underdog in the campaign but lately expressed more optimism and now says she expects to become the country’s 47th president. If elected, she would be the first woman to be the American leader, its first of South Asian descent and its second Black president after Barack Obama.  

She has described Trump as an “unserious man,” saying he would be a threat to American democracy and unhinged by any normal presidential constraints after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that presidents cannot be prosecuted for any wrongdoing linked to their official actions.   

Pollsters say the country’s voters are deeply divided between the two candidates. It is an assessment reflected in how major media outlets look at the possible outcome just ahead of the official Election Day.  

Last-minute polling shows the Harris-Trump race all but tied in the battleground states, within the margin of statistical error.  

ABC News polling shows Trump winning five of the seven battleground states, but The Washington Post says its aggregation of polls has Harris ahead in four. The New York Times says Trump is ahead in four, Harris two, and the race tied in Pennsylvania.   

The importance of battleground states cannot be overstated.  

U.S. presidential elections are not decided by the national popular vote but through the Electoral College, which turns the election into 50 state-by-state contests, with 48 of the states awarding all their electoral votes to the winner in those states. Nebraska and Maine allocate theirs by both statewide and congressional district vote counts.  

The number of electoral votes in each state is based on population, so the biggest states hold the most sway in determining the overall national outcome, with the winner needing 270 of the 538 electoral votes to claim the presidency. Pennsylvania alone has 19 electoral votes.  

Polls show either Harris or Trump with substantial or comfortable leads in 43 of the states, enough for each to get to 200 electoral votes or more. Barring an upset in one of those states, the winner will be decided in the seven remaining battleground states, where both Harris and Trump have staged frequent rallies, all but ignoring the rest of the country for campaign stops.
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