A poll for the U.S. presidential election showing support for Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump is seen on a television in the home of a Trump supporter in Horicon, Wis. on Nov. 4.ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP/Getty Images
Dashing for the finish line in a neck-and-neck race, Donald Trump portrayed undocumented immigrants as violent monsters, returning to the foundational message of his political career, while Kamala Harris promised the country a fresh start.
Both spent the last day before the U.S. presidential election cramming in multiple swing state events, with a focus on Pennsylvania.
U.S. voters will decide Tuesday whether to return Mr. Trump to the White House four years after he tried to overturn the last election and months after he became the first former president to be criminally convicted – or to make Ms. Harris their country’s first female chief executive.
The election will also decide control of Congress, which polls show is also a toss-up. And in 10 states holding ballot measures, it will decide whether they enshrine abortion rights in their constitutions.
Mr. Trump hit three swing states on Monday, travelling from North Carolina to Pennsylvania to Michigan. The 78-year-old Republican is scheduled to watch returns on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate.
In Reading, Pa., a post-industrial city of 95,000, Mr. Trump sought to make inroads with the majority-Latino population after a speaker at his Madison Square Garden rally just over a week ago drew opprobrium for making disparaging remarks about Puerto Rico and Latinos in general.
He did not, however, moderate his rhetoric on Latin American asylum seekers for the crowd, describing them as murderous criminals. “We can’t have these monsters coming over,” he said. “The day I’m sworn in is the day these mass deportations begin.”
Rounding up at least 11 million undocumented people and kicking them out of the country is central to Mr. Trump’s promised agenda of change.
He is also pledging to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with political loyalists, and has hinted he will end U.S. military aid to Ukraine. And he has vowed to impose 10 to 20 per cent tariffs on all imports and renegotiate North America’s continental trade agreement a second time, likely inflicting severe economic pain on Canada and other U.S. allies.
Mr. Trump is also threatening to use his office to take revenge on political opponents and others he feels have wronged him.
Ms. Harris spent Monday in Pennsylvania – the most populous swing state with 19 electoral college votes, no Democrat since 1948 has won the presidency without carrying it – making five stops with the finish in Philadelphia, a Democratic stronghold and the U.S.’s original capital.
“America is ready for a fresh start and America is ready for a new way forward, where we see our fellow Americans not as an enemy but as a neighbour,” she said in Allentown, another small majority-Latino city where Democrats are aiming to shore up one of their linchpin voting demographics. “We are not going back because ours is a fight for the future.”
Election supplies are loaded into a voting tent set up by FEMA in Burnsville, N.C. on Nov. 4.ALLISON JOYCE/AFP/Getty Images
Ms. Harris is holding an election-night party at Howard University, the storied historically Black university in Washington that is her alma mater.
The Vice-President, 60, who spent her adolescence in Montreal, would be the first person to have lived long-term in Canada to become U.S. president. The biracial daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, she has not played up the historic nature of her campaign.
Instead, she is focusing on attacking Mr. Trump as a “wannabe dictator,” assailing his role in ending Roe v. Wade abortion protections and accusing him of planning cuts to Medicare and Social Security based on Project 2025, a governing plan for Mr. Trump created by the Heritage Foundation think tank.
Mr. Trump’s campaign, which has disowned Project 2025, is already ramping up efforts to reverse the result if Ms. Harris wins, raising fears of a repeat of the 2020 election, when his lies about voter fraud culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Last week, he took to Truth Social to claim “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before.” His campaign and allied groups have already filed scores of lawsuits across the country seeking more stringent rules for mail-in ballots and the power of judges to overturn elections, among other things.
The election is likely to hinge on voters in seven swing states, meaning shifts in turnout by key voting demographics could deliver either candidate a narrow or decisive victory. Nearly 80 million people have voted early and, with many of these being mail-in ballots that take time to process, the winner may not be known for days. Such turnout is a rate of 37 per cent – relatively high but still far short of the 70 per cent who voted in advance during the pandemic election of 2020.
If he wins, Mr. Trump will be only the second former president, after Grover Cleveland in 1892, to return to the presidency after previously losing re-election.
The campaign has been one of the most tumultuous in U.S. history. Mr. Trump was convicted in May of 34 felonies related to a hush-money payment to a porn star before the 2016 election, while other juries earlier found him civilly liable for sexual abuse and business fraud. He also survived two assassination attempts, including one at a rally in July in which a bullet grazed his ear.
The Democrats, meanwhile, executed an unprecedented switch of presidential candidates after President Joe Biden’s June debate against Mr. Trump raised concerns about the 81-year-old’s mental state.
While Ms. Harris has tried to distance herself from the unpopular Mr. Biden, she is campaigning on measures that continue his agenda: expansion of the social safety net, subsidies for industry and a commitment to the liberal international order. Among other things, she is promising a child tax credit, increased subsidies for low-income people to buy health insurance, measures to control housing prices, and US$100-billion to help companies in the manufacturing sector build more factories.
Mr. Trump has deployed violent rhetoric, describing immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country” and saying political opponents are “the enemy within.” He has also called for a long list of people to be prosecuted or thrown in prison, including Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris, and various elections officials. He has threatened to have CBS and ABC’s broadcasting licences revoked and vowed to have Google prosecuted for displaying negative stories about him in its search results.
If he wins, Mr. Trump is expected to have the Justice Department end two federal cases against him, one for trying to reverse the 2020 election and one for refusing to return classified documents after leaving office.
To those who back Mr. Trump, his troubles are proof of a political establishment trying to take him down. “The perpetuation in the media of ‘he’s the devil, he’s evil, he’s Hitler’ – that energizes people,” said Brian Dority, a 40-year-old construction specialist and Trump supporter in Berks County, Pa.
Ms. Harris, meanwhile, is banking that dislike of Mr. Trump will motivate both traditionally Democratic Black and Latino voters in major cities, and bring over moderate suburban women.
“Trump is a fascist. He’s out of control. He makes a lot of decisions out of his emotions. He’s going to enact retribution on all the people who don’t like him,” said Kathleen Thompson, a 65-year-old retired school classroom assistant in a majority-Black Philadelphia neighbourhood. “After the insurrection, how can people support him?”
A wildcard demographic is Arab-Americans, who usually lean Democratic, but may choose not to vote over the Biden administration’s continued military aid to Israel amid the invasion of Gaza.
With a report from Nathan VanderKlippe in Macon, Ga.