The turbulent 2024 US presidential campaign entered its final hours on Monday (November 4), with Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump competing fiercely at rallies in key political battleground states, and polls show that the competition is too close to win.
Both Democratic candidate Harris and her Republican opponent Trump have visited Pennsylvania many times. Pennsylvania is located in the “Rust Belt” state in the eastern United States and has the most electoral votes among the seven battleground states that may determine the outcome of the national election.
Both candidates held rallies in Pittsburgh, the heart of the US steel-producing region. Trump will also travel to Reading, a smaller city in eastern Pennsylvania, and stop in Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina in the Mid-Atlantic state, and finally hold an evening rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a Republican stronghold, to end the day’s itinerary. In 2016 and 2020, he ended his presidential campaign here.
Harris is in Pennsylvania all day, starting in Scranton, the hometown of President Joe Biden, who replaced him as the Democratic presidential nominee in July after Biden dropped out of the race following a poor debate performance with Trump and a drop in the polls.
She will end the day with a large rally in Philadelphia, the sixth-largest city in the United States and a major Democratic stronghold. Pop star Lady Gaga, other music groups and former talk show host Oprah Winfrey will join Harris to show their support. Harris will also travel to Allentown, a majority-Latino city, for a campaign stop on the day, and then, like Trump, she will travel to Reading, a city of 95,000 residents where 70% of residents are Latino, most of them Puerto Rican.
Trump will face anger in Reading over a joke Tony Hinchcliffe told at his New York rally last week that described the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” Trump responded a day later that he hadn’t heard the joke but didn’t try to deny it, though his campaign said the joke didn’t reflect his views.
Meanwhile, Harris laid out a blueprint for upgrading the island’s hurricane-damaged power grid, and her campaign said undecided Hispanic voters were voting for her now in part because they were upset about the disparagement of Puerto Rico. In Scranton, her first stop of the day, Harris encouraged campaign workers to knock on doors, looking for people who might vote for her and to convince those who are undecided. “Let’s get to work,” she said. “There’s 24 hours left.”
In Raleigh, Trump renewed his attack on migrants crossing the Mexican border into the U.S., threatening Mexico with steep tariffs on all imports to curb illegal immigration. If they don’t stop these criminals and drugs from coming into our country, I will immediately impose a 25% tariff on all of their goods coming into the United States,” he said.
The campaign for a new four-year White House term in 2024 began in January, and Tuesday is official Election Day, with more than 80 million Americans already voting in person or by mail. With early voting ending Monday in some states and already closed elsewhere, the total number of voters is more than half of the 158 million who voted in the 2020 election, when Biden defeated Trump. It was a Democratic victory, but Trump still says his victory was stolen by voting rules and vote counting fraud. Dozens of court decisions have gone against him, often by judges appointed by Trump. But he told a rally in Pennsylvania on Sunday that he “should not leave” the White House when Biden takes office in 2021. As he recalled two assassination attempts during this year’s campaign that had to be reinforced with security at rallies, he said he wouldn’t mind if reporters – purveyors of what he sees as “fake news” – were shot. Trump said he would accept Tuesday’s results only if he believed the election was fair, a result that Democratic critics say they believe they will only accept if he wins. Both Trump and Harris have assembled large teams of lawyers to debate voting and counting issues that arise during Tuesday’s day, night and in the days that follow until there is a clear winner.
Both candidates expressed optimism about the results. Trump said he would win in a landslide, a result that would make him the second-most powerful Republican in the U.S. since Grover Cleveland in the 1880s. Cleveland to serve two non-consecutive terms. He will also be the first president to take office as a felon, after being convicted of 34 counts for paying hush money to a porn film star before his successful 2016 presidential run.
Trump has often launched angry attacks on Democratic opponents during the campaign, calling them “internal enemies” and a threat to the country’s future. He disparaged Harris as having limited intelligence and said she would be a pawn for other world leaders in the game of international relations.
Harris has claimed for weeks that she is an underdog in the race, but has recently expressed more optimism and now says she is on track to become the 47th president of the United States. If elected, she would be the first female leader of the United States, the first leader of South Asian descent and the first person to serve as president since Barack Obama. Obama.
She described Trump as a “non-serious person” who would pose a threat to American democracy and is not subject to any normal presidential restrictions because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that the president cannot be prosecuted for any misconduct related to his official conduct.
Pollsters say American voters are deeply divided between the two candidates. This assessment is reflected in the mainstream media’s views on possible results before the official election day. Last-minute polls showed Harris and Trump in a nearly tied race in battleground states, within the margin of statistical error. ABC News polls showed Trump winning five of the seven battleground states, but The Washington Post said its aggregated polls showed Harris leading in four states. The New York Times said Trump was ahead in four states and Harris was ahead in two states, with the two tied in Pennsylvania.
The importance of battleground states cannot be overstated. The U.S. presidential election is not decided by the national popular vote, but by the Electoral College, which turns the election into a 50-state contest, with the winner of 48 states winning all the electoral votes. Nebraska and Maine divide their electoral votes based on statewide and congressional district votes. The number of electoral votes in each state is based on population, so the largest states have the most influence in determining the outcome for the entire country, with the winner needing 270 of the 538 electoral votes to be elected president. Pennsylvania alone has 19 electoral votes.
Polls show either Harris or Trump with sizable leads in 43 states, enough for each to receive 200 or more electoral votes. Unless one of those states turns out to be a surprise, the winner will be decided in the seven remaining battleground states, where both Harris and Trump have held frequent rallies and have barely campaigned elsewhere in the country.
