Kamala Harris and Donald Trump begin the closing weekend of the most stressful US presidential campaign in modern history, with a rush of swing-state rallies that will put their stamina to the test — as well as their ability to persuade the country’s remaining undecided voters.
Harris, who is running for president as the country’s first woman, will utilize rallies in Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan to emphasize that Trump is a threat to American democracy.
Trump, seeking a dramatic comeback to the White House after losing in 2020 and becoming the first presidential nominee to be convicted of a crime, promises a radical right-wing takeover of the government as well as aggressive trade battles to push his ideology of “America first.”
The 78-year-old, who campaigned in Milwaukee, Wisconsin late Friday, just a few miles from Harris’s event, will almost certainly run across her again as Trump makes appearances in North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.
Their frenetic schedule will run right into Monday, culminating with late-night rallies — in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for Trump and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for Harris.
Election Day is Tuesday, but Americans have been voting for weeks, with over 70 million ballots already cast, including a record four million in Georgia, where Democrats are pulling out all the brakes to keep the state in their column.
Opinion polls continue to show a tied race, particularly in the seven battleground states that are likely to decide the outcome under the US electoral college system, leaving the Republican businessman and his 60-year-old Democratic rival fighting hard to extract even slivers of support from each other’s campaigns.
Harris, who is presently President Joe Biden’s vice president, is doing so by appealing to moderate voters while also driving her base to the polls with a strong ground game and get-out-the-vote campaign.
And by painting Trump as a toxic authoritarian, she is also encouraging voters to “finally turn the page” on the former president.
“He is someone who is increasingly unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance — and the man is out for unchecked power,” she told supporters in Little Chute, Wisconsin.
‘Thrill of a lifetime’
Trump, meanwhile, has doubled down on his already extreme rhetoric in hopes of firing up his loyal base to turn out in massive numbers.
“Kamala’s closing message to America is that she hates you,” Trump fumed on Friday night in Warren, Michigan, where he trashed the economy under Biden and Harris as a disaster — which economists say it clearly is not — and warned that “a 1929-style economic depression” would ensue if Harris were elected.
Citing her hawkish foreign policy views, Trump earlier had conjured the image of former Republican representative turned Harris supporter Liz Cheney being shot.
“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face,” Trump said.
Despite the rhetoric, Trump waxed nostalgic on Friday about how his experience campaigning over the past nine years has been “the thrill of a lifetime.”
“And now we want to take that thrill and turn it into ‘let’s do business,’ right?”
Harris, the nation’s first Black and first Asian-American vice president, meanwhile has sought to harness celebrity star power like Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen in the campaign’s waning days.
Jennifer Lopez, a pop icon of Puerto Rican heritage, joined Harris onstage Thursday, amid a firestorm triggered by a Trump rally warm-up speaker branding the US territory a “floating island of garbage.”
Grammy-winning rapper Cardi B appeared with the candidate Friday night, asking the crowd in Milwaukee, “Are we ready to make history?”
With the election just days away — and Trump refusing to clarify whether he will accept the results if he loses — businesses in the nation’s capital, Washington, have begun boarding up storefronts as municipal officials warn of a “fluid, unpredictable security environment” in the days following the vote.
Trump has already accused fraud and cheating in swing areas like Pennsylvania, laying the groundwork for what many worry will be further turbulence following the violence that erupted at the US Capitol after the 2020 election.