Former President Trump and Vice President Harris are making their final speeches to voters before Election Day, seeking a short-term advantage as the race is essentially a dead heat.
The two candidates are trying to mobilize their base and appeal to any remaining undecided voters as polling averages show Trump and Harris within three percentage points of each other in each of the seven battleground states that are expected to determine the winner on Tuesday.
Harris will spend all day Monday in Pennsylvania, a critical swing state that political observers say must be won if either candidate wants to capture the White House.
Trump, meanwhile, is visiting 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, on each of the final three days of the campaign.
Polls ahead of election week point to a turbulent race and suggest the contest could prove to be a photo finish.
An NBC News poll released Sunday showed Trump and Harris each at 49 percent nationally. The poll found that 48 percent of respondents approved of the way Trump has handled his presidency, compared to just 41 percent who said they approved of President Biden’s term, a sign that Harris may be facing headwinds could come across.
A New York Times/Siena College poll of battleground states released Sunday also showed a close race.
The poll showed Harris leading in Nevada by 3 points, in North Carolina by 2 points, in Wisconsin by 2 points and in Georgia by 1 point. In Arizona, Trump had a four-point lead, and in Pennsylvania and Michigan the two candidates were tied.
A shocking poll result came on Saturday when a poll in the Des Moines Register Harris leads the Hawkeye State by three percentage points, according to a poll by gold standard Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer.
The poll could be an outlier, as an Emerson College poll released the same day showed Trump leading by 10 points in a state where he was ahead by 8 percentage points in 2020. But the Selzer poll showed Harris with a 20-point lead among women, particularly on the issue of abortion, and that she was making massive gains among older voters, which, if true, would facilitate sway her in other states in the country to advance the Midwest.
According to Decision Desk HQ/The Hill’s, Trump and Harris are tied aggregated query. Both candidates had 48.3 percent on Sunday evening.
The race is just as close in the key battleground states.
Trump has a lead of 0.5 percentage points in Pennsylvaniaa lead of 0.4 percentage points in Wisconsina lead of 1.5 percentage points in Nevadaa lead of 1.5 percentage points in North Carolinaa lead of 2.1 percentage points in Georgiaand a lead of 2.4 percentage points in Arizona. Harris now has a lead of 0.3 percentage points in Michigan.
Tens of millions of people have already gone to the polls, where early voting numbers have broken records in places like swing states North Carolina and Georgia.
The two candidates delivered different closing messages in the grueling home stretch of the election campaign
Trump has tried to make the case that voters are no better off than they were when he left the White House four years ago and that he can “fix” the economy and the southern border.
But that pitch was overshadowed by a series of self-created controversies about his campaign.
A rally at Madison Square Garden was marked by crude comments and a racist joke that compared Puerto Rico to a “garbage island.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an outspoken vaccine skeptic, claimed he would be given broad powers over health officials and be allowed to review vaccination data. And Trump used violent images aimed at Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), drawing intense backlash.
Harris seized on Trump’s Cheney comments, calling them “disqualifying.” Her campaign focused largely on warning voters about a possible second term and encouraging the nation to begin a novel political chapter.
She made that message clear in the final days of the campaign, calling Trump “unstable” and seeking power, claiming he had an “enemies list” and criticizing Trump for suggesting he was opposing the military his enemies would utilize.
The two candidates couldn’t be more different, but in a nation as politically divided as ever, anyone can win the race.
Despite the steadily rising poll numbers, Republicans are confident about Trump’s chances.
“He’s on his way to winning,” said Sean Spicer, a former press secretary in the Trump White House.
Trump’s allies point to robust turnout in early voting resulting from Trump’s encouragement and shifts in the party’s voter registration since 2020, as well as public polling that shows the former president in a stronger position than his two previous White House bids point in previous cycles.
Trump campaign officials said internal data also gave them cause for optimism, arguing that the former president had a better chance of winning 270 electoral votes than Harris, whose path to victory depends heavily on defeating the blue walls of Michigan . Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
But if there’s one thing keeping some Trump allies up at night ahead of Election Day, it’s worries about the campaign’s ground politics, particularly in the blue wall states. The Trump campaign has relied on unproven outside groups, including one backed by Elon Musk, to advance the election effort.
“I still think our vulnerability is voting,” said a GOP strategist close to the Trump campaign. “We had the better message in this election. Most of the top topics spoke in our favor. We had a candidate that people might disagree about, but the man’s name is 100 percent known, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. Almost all of the key metrics are going our way.”
Meanwhile, the Harris campaign sees early voting as an advantage for them and argued that Trump’s doubts about the voting system in a state like Pennsylvania are a sign that he is “obviously concerned that he will lose the election.”
The Harris campaign argued that high turnout among Republican voters was not a problem for them, suggesting that these voters simply changed their “voting mode” and likely all voted on Election Day in 2020.
“What we are seeing is that Trump’s early voting is actually being driven by the same voters who have historically voted for Donald Trump on Election Day. So they’re just changing the way they vote,” a senior Harris campaign official said.
The Harris campaign entered the weekend feeling robust about undecided voters, and polls in the days since show the group casting more votes for her than for Trump.
“We also still know that there are still undecided, persuadeable voters in the electorate, but we also see in our data that they will switch to the vice president if we close this race,” the Harris official said.
Updated at 7:29 a.m. EDT
