Washington: On Sunday, with fewer than 48 hours of campaigning, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris launched a desperate final push across US swing states to gain a decisive advantage in a fiercely contested and historically close presidential election.
In the run-up to Tuesday’s election, more than 76 million people have already cast their ballots, and the race is close, with more states knotted in the polls. According to a final New York Times/Siena survey released on Sunday, all seven swing states’ results fell inside the error range.
Given the race’s dramatic turns and the candidates’ campaign techniques and future goals couldn’t be more different, the closeness of the contest is all the more surprising.
“You hold the key to our country’s destiny. You have to stand up on Tuesday,” Trump said at his first rally of the day in Pennsylvania, where he repeated baseless accusations of election tampering.
In a desperate attempt to support the Great Lakes states, considered crucial to any Democratic ticket, Harris planned to spend the day in Michigan, starting in Detroit and ending with a rally at Michigan State University in the evening.
The three largest prizes in the “Electoral College” system, which gives states influence based on population, were Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia, the center of Trump’s Sunday plan.
If Trump loses, as he did four years ago, he will deny the outcome. He boosted his allegations of widespread “cheating” on Sunday by capitalizing on a few anomalies that election officials had discovered. At the event, he emphasized, “They are fighting so hard to steal this damn thing.”
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In Pennsylvania, which has a sizable Puerto Rican population, Republicans are likewise rushing to control the damage after a speaker at Trump’s event in New York inspired outrage by calling the US territory a “floating island of garbage.”
Similar to Pennsylvania, Michigan is one of the seven battlegrounds closely monitored. The state was once a Democratic bastion, but Trump turned it around on his way to defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016. In 2020, Joe Biden brought it back to the Democratic column with the support of a sizable Black community and unionized workers.
The 200,000-person Arab-American community, however, has criticized Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza, and Harris runs the risk of losing their support this time.
Black support for the Democratic ticket has been declining, according to pollsters, and Harris’s staff admits that more work has to be done to get enough African American men to join Biden’s victorious alliance in 2020.
However, the high percentage of women who cast votes among the early voters has given her team some consolation since reproductive rights have been a prominent voter concern.
Harris’ unexpected appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” the iconic sketch show, on Saturday concluded her day on the campaign trail by making fun of her opponent in the presidential election, Donald Trump.
During a well-received appearance with comedian Maya Rudolph, who has been portraying Kamala as “America’s fun aunt” on the show, the vice president declared, “Keep Kamala and carry on-ala!”
The Harris campaign, hungry for as much television exposure as possible, has secured a two-minute slot to broadcast during Sunday’s NFL football games, which include the Detroit Lions vs. Green Bay Packers game, both of which are from pivotal swing states.
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Harris says in the advertisement that she will “build a brighter future for our nation” and be “a president for all Americans.”
According to her campaign’s research, the “last week has proven decisive in cementing the choice in this election with both undecided and lower-propensity voters,” especially when comparing the closing argument rallies of the two candidates.
Harris, 60, received a lift on Saturday in Iowa after a surprise turnaround in the penultimate Des Moines Register poll before Election Day, which is regarded as a reliable indicator of broader public sentiment. Trump carried the state handily in 2016 and 2020.
The results were rejected by Trump during his Pennsylvania morning rally as a “fake poll.”
