KAMALA HARRIS AND Donald Trump dueled across the Sun Belt on Saturday in an effort to sway every undecided voter in the battleground states on the final weekend of the tensest US election of modern times.
Seventy-five million people have already cast early ballots as the hours tick down to the Election Day climax on 5 November.
The country – and the world – could then face a nail-biting wait to know whether Harris becomes the first US woman president or Trump secures a spectacular return to power after his attempt to overturn his 2020 reelection loss to Joe Biden.
The rivals literally crossed paths on Saturday, with Harris’s official vice presidential Air Force Two and Trump’s personal jet sharing the airport tarmac in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Both held rallies in North Carolina, while Harris also spoke to supporters in Georgia, another of the seven swing states seen as the keys to victory in an otherwise dead-even nationwide contest.
The rounds of high-stakes speeches before thousands of people at each stop continue Sunday when Harris holds multiple events in the swing state of Michigan and Trump rallies with supporters in Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
Most polls show Trump, 78, and Harris, 60, within the margin of error from each other across the swing states.
As of Saturday evening, neither candidate had a margin greater than three points in any of the seven battleground states set to determine the presidency, according to the polling averages maintained by RealClearPolitics.
For Harris, a key electorate is women voters angered over the ruling by justices appointed by then-president Trump to the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade, ending a decades-long constitutional right to abortion.
“Donald Trump’s not done. He will ban abortion nationwide,” Harris said in Atlanta, Georgia.
She painted Trump as “increasingly unstable, obsessed with revenge” and “out for unchecked power.”
“We have an opportunity in this election to finally turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump who spends full time trying to keep us divided and afraid of each other,” she said.
Trump, stirring up his right-wing base, continued to deliver increasingly dark rhetoric.
In Salem, Virginia, he began his speech by saying: “I’ve come today with a message of hope for all.”
But he was soon back to conjuring the apocalyptic vision he’d laid out hours earlier in North Carolina.
Calling his opponent “low IQ” and “stupid,” he said Harris would usher in an economic “depression,” asking the crowd: “Do you want to lose your job and maybe your house and pension?”
In later remarks, he dipped into far-right rhetoric with a promise to “keep American for American citizens.”
“We’re going to have American people in our communities now,” he said.
Trump has worked hard to appeal to men, appearing on podcasts with martial artists, spending time in barbershops and meeting with crypto entrepreneurs. With Harris getting a surge in support from women, some predict a dramatic gender gap in the results.
Thousands demonstrated Saturday in central Washington for a Women’s March.
Trump refuses to say whether he would accept a loss, sparking fears of unrest.
Businesses in the US capital have begun boarding up storefronts as city authorities warn of a “fluid, unpredictable security environment.”
Trump is already alleging fraud and cheating in swing states such as Pennsylvania, much as he did in 2020 ahead of his unprecedented attempt to overturn the election, culminating in the attack by followers on the US Capitol.
On Saturday, he claimed he could win in Virginia, despite no polls indicating this, and said even heavily Democratic California would vote for him “if we had an honest election.”
Today, Harris will spend the day in Michigan while Trump will head to Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia, the three biggest prizes in the Electoral College system that awards states influence according to their size.
The Republican candidate has been scrambling to distract from the now week-long scandal around his rally at New York’s iconic Madison Square Garden in which warm-up speakers alienated Hispanics and women with racist and sexist language.
None of Trump’s events today take place in areas with large Hispanic populations, but Pennsylvania is the swing state with the most Puerto Ricans, a community particularly angered by the bigotry at Trump’s rally.
“The choice could not be clearer for Pennsylvanians: President Donald J. Trump stands for America First policies while Kamala Harris represents incompetence and dangerously liberal policies that are devastating Pennsylvania families,” the Trump campaign said.
Michigan is one of the seven closely watched battlegrounds.
Trump flipped the “Great Lake State,” a former Democratic stronghold, on his way to defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016. Biden returned it to the Democratic column in 2020, buoyed by unionised workers and a large Black community.
But this time, Harris risks losing the support of a 200,000-strong Arab-American community that has denounced Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza.
Pollsters have noted an erosion in Black support for the Democratic ticket and Harris’s aides acknowledge that they still have work to do to turn out enough African American men to match Biden’s winning coalition in 2020.
Keen on as much TV exposure as possible, the Harris campaign has booked a two-minute spot to air Sunday during football games, including a tie between two NFL teams from the crucial swing states – the Green Bay Packers against the Detroit Lions.
In the ad, Harris pledges to be “a president for all Americans” and promises to “build a brighter future for our nation.”
“The campaign’s research shows that the last week has proven decisive in cementing the choice in this election with both undecided and lower-propensity voters,” her campaign said.
“The closing argument split screen of Madison Square Garden and its fallout against the Ellipse has broken through and crystallized the choice for this slice of the electorate.”
Harris got a boost Saturday as the final Des Moines Register poll before Election Day – seen as a highly credible test of wider public sentiment – showed a stunning turnaround, with Harris ahead in a state won easily by Trump in 2016 and 2020.
She leads by three points in a poll that showed her trailing Trump by four points in September.
The candidates’ frantic schedules will run right into Monday, culminating with late-night rallies – in Grand Rapids, Michigan for Trump and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for Harris.
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