A presidential campaign that has careened through a felony trial, an incumbent president being pushed off the ticket and multiple assassination attempts comes down to a final sprint across a handful of states on Election Day eve.
A presidential campaign that has careened through a felony trial, an incumbent president being pushed off the ticket and multiple assassination attempts comes down to a final sprint across a handful of states on Election Day eve.
A presidential election unlike any other in US history is entering its last full day with Donald Trump, Kamala Harris and their campaigns scrambling to get supporters to the polls.
The electorate is divided down the middle, both nationally and in the seven battleground states expected to decide the winner on Tuesday.
Trump, a 78-year-old Republican, survived two assassination attempts, just weeks after a jury in New York – the city whose tabloids first elevated him to national fame and notoriety – made him the first former US president to be convicted of a felony.
Harris, 60, was catapulted to the top of the Democratic ticket in July – giving her a chance to become the first woman to become president – after President Joe Biden, 81, had a disastrous debate performance and dropped his re-election bid under pressure from his party.
Polls show Harris and Trump running neck and neck nationally and in the battleground states. More than 78 million voters have already cast ballots, according to Election Lab at the University of Florida.
In the final days of this campaign, both sides are flooding social media sites and TV and radio stations with a last round of campaign ads, and racing to knock on doors and make calls.
Harris’s campaign team believes the sheer size of its voter mobilisation efforts is making a difference and says its volunteers knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors in each of the battleground states this weekend.
“We are feeling very good about where we are right now,” campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told reporters.
The campaign says its internal data shows that undecided voters are breaking in their favour, particularly women in the battleground states, and that they see an increase in early voting among core parts of their coalition, including young voters and voters of colour.
Trump’s campaign has its own in-house canvassing operation, but has effectively outsourced most of the work to outside super PACs (political action committees), which can raise and spend unlimited sums of money.
They have been more focused on contacting “low propensity” voters, or voters who often do not go to the polls, instead of appealing to middle-of-the-road voters who can flip to either side.
Many in this category are Trump supporters, but they are not normally reliable voters. However, Trump has had success in getting them to turn out in the past.
By cherry-picking the voters they want to contact, Trump and his team say they are sending door knockers to places where it makes a difference and being smart about spending.
US voters will also cast their ballots for thousands of local, state and federal officials and weigh in on crucial referendums.
This includes all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 34 seats or one-third of those in the US Senate, 11 elections for state governors, as well as abortion rights in 10 states.
Trump has promised “retribution”, including prosecuting his political rivals, and described Democrats as the “enemy within”.
On Sunday, he complained about gaps in the bullet-proof glass surrounding him as he spoke at a rally and mused that an assassin would have to shoot through the news media to get him.
Harris has cast Trump as a danger to democracy but sounded optimistic at a Detroit church on Sunday.
“As I travel, I see Americans from so-called red states to so-called blue states who are ready to bend the arc of history towards justice,” Harris said. “And the great thing about living in a democracy, as long as we can hold on to it, is that we have the power, each of us, to answer that question.”
Voters responding to a late-October Reuters/Ipsos poll ranked threats to democracy as the second-biggest problem facing the US today, just behind the economy.
Trump believes concerns about immigration, the economy and high prices, especially for food and rent, will carry him to the White House.
His final day of campaigning on Monday will include stops in three of the seven battleground states expected to determine the winner.
“This is really the end of a journey, but a new one will be starting,” said Trump, speaking at his first rally of the day in Raleigh, North Carolina.
“Hopefully, everything will work out well. We’re way leading,” he said, urging people to “get out and vote”.
Trump will also visit Reading and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, and Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the Arab-American vote could be crucial. He then plans to return to Palm Beach, Florida, to vote and await election results.
Harris started off Monday in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where she urged a room of campaign workers to “enjoy this moment” as she thanked everyone for volunteering.
“Let’s get out the vote. Let’s win. Let’s get to work. Twenty-four hours to go,” she said. “We are all in this together. We rise and fall together.”
Harris also plans to spend Monday campaigning in Pennsylvania’s Allentown, one of the most competitive parts of the state, with a large Puerto Rican electorate energised by pejorative remarks made during a recent Trump campaign rally. Then, she will visit a Puerto Rican restaurant in Reading with progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, before heading on to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
Her evening rally in Pittsburgh will feature performances by DJ D-Nice, Katy Perry and Andra Day, before she rallies at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, famous for the “Rocky Steps” and featuring a statue of the fictional Hollywood movie boxer.
Former President Donald Trump is stepping up his demands that the winner of the presidential race be declared shortly after polls close Tuesday, well before all the votes are counted.
Trump set the pattern in 2020, when he declared that he had won during the early morning hours after Election Day. That led his allies to demand that officials “stop the count!” He and many other conservatives have spent the past four years falsely claiming that fraud cost him that election and bemoaning how long it takes to count ballots in the U.S.
But one of many reasons we are unlikely to know the winner quickly on election night is that Republican lawmakers in two key swing states have refused to change laws that delay the count. That will make it look as if Trump is initially leading, even if that changes as more ballots are tallied later. Another reason is that most indications are this will be a very close election, and it takes longer to determine who won close elections than blowouts.
In the end, election experts note, the priority in vote-counting is to make sure it’s an accurate and secure tally, not to end the suspense moments after polls close.
“There’s nothing nefarious about it,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The time delay is to protect the integrity of the process.”
Trump’s demand also doesn’t seem to account for the six time zones from the East Coast to Hawaii.
These claims have nothing to do with election integrity and all to do with making him president again, said David Becker, an elections expert and co-author of “The Big Truth,” debunking Trump’s 2020 election lies.
“When he’s behind, he’ll say continue the count. When he’s ahead, he’ll say stop the count,” Becker said. “But that’s not how it works.”
Becker said it’s not realistic for election officials in thousands of jurisdictions to “instantly snap their fingers and count 160 million multi-page ballots with dozens of races on them.”
During a Sunday rally in Pennsylvania, Trump demanded that the race be decided soon after some polls begin closing.
“They have to be decided by 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock on Tuesday night,” Trump said. “Bunch of crooked people. These are crooked people.”
It was not clear who he was targeting with the “crooked people” remark.
Timing is one example of why Trump’s demands don’t match the reality of conducting elections in the U.S. By 11 p.m. Eastern time, polls will just be closing in the two Western swing states of Arizona and Nevada. It’s a big country, and there’s simply no way to know who won those states instantly.
Trump has led conservatives to bemoan that the U.S. doesn’t count elections as swiftly as France or Argentina, where results for recent races have been announced within hours of polls closing. But that’s because those countries tabulate only a single election at a time. The decentralized U.S. system prevents the federal government from controlling elections.
Instead, votes are counted in nearly 10,000 separate jurisdictions, each of which has its own races for the state legislature, city council, school boards and ballot measures to tabulate at the same time. That’s why it takes longer for the U.S. to count votes.
What to know about the 2024 Election
The Associated Press calls races when there is no possibility that the trailing candidate can make up the gap. Sometimes, if one candidate is significantly behind, a winner can be called quickly. But if the margin is narrow, then every last vote could matter. It takes a while before every vote is counted even in the most efficient jurisdictions in the country.
In 2018, for example, Republican Rick Scott won the U.S. Senate race in Florida, a state conservatives regularly praise for its quick tally. But the AP didn’t call Scott’s victory until after the conclusion of a recount on Nov. 20 because Scott’s margin was so slim.
It also takes time to count every one of the millions of votes because election officials have to process disputed, or “provisional,” ballots, and to see if they were legitimately cast. Overseas ballots from military members or other U.S. citizens abroad can trickle in at the last minute. Mail ballots usually land early, but there’s a lengthy process to make sure they’re not cast fraudulently. If that process doesn’t start before Election Day, it can back up the count.
Some states, such as Arizona, also give voters whose mail ballots were rejected because the signatures didn’t match up to five days to prove they actually cast the ballot. That means final numbers simply cannot be available Tuesday night.
Some of the sluggishness is due to state-specific election rules. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two of the most important swing states, election officials for years have pleaded with Republican lawmakers to change the law that prevents them from processing their mail ballots before Election Day. That means mail ballots get tallied late, and frequently the results don’t start to get reported until after Election Day.
Since Democrats dominate mail voting, that makes it seem like Republicans are in the lead there until the early hours of the next morning, when Democratic mail votes finally get added to the tally. Experts even have names for this — the “red mirage” or the “blue shift.” Trump exploited that dynamic in 2020 when he had his supporters demand an abrupt end to vote counts — the ballots that remained untallied were largely mail ones that were for Joe Biden.
Michigan used to have similar restrictions, but after Democrats won control of the state Legislature in 2022 they removed the prohibition on early processing of mail ballots. That state’s Democratic Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, said she hopes to have most results available by Wednesday.
“At the end of the day, chief election officials are the folks who have the ability to provide those accurate results. Americans should focus on what they say and not what any specific candidate or folks who are part of the campaign say,” said Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Some of Trump’s allies say he should be even more aggressive about declaring victory this time around.
Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon, who in 2020 predicted the then-president would declare victory before the race was called, advocated for a similar strategy during a recent press conference after he was released from federal prison, where he was serving time for a contempt of Congress conviction related to the investigation into Trump’s effort to overturn his loss in 2020.
“President Trump came up at 2:30 in the morning and talked,” Bannon said. “He should have done it at 11 o’clock in 2020.”
Other Trump supporters have taken a darker tone. His former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, suggested during a recent interview on the right-wing American Truth Project podcast that violence could erupt in states still counting ballots the day after Election Day because people “are just not going to put up with it.”
Trying to project a sense of inevitability about a Trump win, the former president and his supporters have been touting early vote data and favorable polls to contend the election is all but over. Republicans have returned to voting early after largely staying away at Trump’s direction in 2020 and 2022. In some swing states that track party registration, registered Republicans are outvoting Democrats in early voting.
But that doesn’t mean Republicans are ahead in any meaningful sense. Early voting data does not tell you who will win an election because it only records who voted, not how they voted.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has been explicitly targeting Republicans disillusioned by Trump. In each of those states where more Republicans have voted, there also are huge numbers of voters casting early ballots who are not registered with either of the two major political parties. If Harris won just a tiny fraction more of those votes than Trump, it would erase the small leads Republicans have.
There’s only one way to find out who won the presidential election: Wait until enough votes are tallied, whenever that is.