Harris closes campaign in Philadelphia, Trump in Michigan on the eve of a deadlocked election

By Nandita Bose and Steve Holland

PHILADELPHIA/GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan (Reuters) -Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both predicted victory as they campaigned in Pennsylvania and other battleground states on Monday on the final, frenetic day of an exceptionally close U.S. presidential election.

The campaign has seen dizzying twists and turns: two assassination attempts and a felony conviction for Republican former President Trump, and Democratic Vice President Harris’ surprise rise to the top of the ticket after President Joe Biden, 81, dropped his re-election bid under pressure from his own party. According to analytics firm AdImpact, more than $2.6 billion has been spent since March to influence voters’ minds.

Nevertheless, polls show Trump, 78, and Harris, 60, in close ties. The winner may not be known for days after Tuesday’s vote, though Trump has already signaled he will try to fight any defeat as he did in 2020.

Both candidates predicted victory as they gathered in Pennsylvania on Monday to urge supporters who have not yet cast their ballots to show up on Election Day. The state offers the largest share of votes in the Electoral College of all seven battleground states expected to determine the outcome.

Trump also campaigned in North Carolina and Michigan on the final full day of the campaign and was scheduled to return to his home in Palm Beach, Florida, to vote and await election results.

Harris planned five campaign stops in Pennsylvania, including two cities Trump also visited, Reading and Pittsburgh.

She ended the day in Philadelphia with a star-studded event at the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s “Rocky steps,” site of a famous scene from the movie “Rocky.”

Despite enjoying the support of A-list celebrities including Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey, both of whom rallied the crowd in Philadelphia before Harris took the stage, Harris cast herself as the underdog who, like Rocky, was ready to “move to victory” to climb’.

“Momentum is on our side,” Harris told a crowd that chanted back, “We will win.”

“Tonight we end as we began: with optimism, with energy, with joy,” said Harris, predicting one of the closest elections in American history.

In Allentown, Harris appealed to the city’s sizable Puerto Rican community, which was outraged by a comedian’s insults at a Trump rally last week. She later went door knocking in Reading and held a brief rally in Pittsburgh, where pop star Katy Perry played a set.

Trump led his fourth and final rally after midnight in front of a packed arena in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the third straight presidential election in which he used the city for his final event.

He promoted his signature issues of increasing border security while attacking the economic performance of the Biden-Harris years.

It was also likely the last campaign rally of his career, as he has said he has no plans to run for president again if he fails to reach the high office in Tuesday’s elections.

“This is the last one,” said Trump, who estimates he has held 930 rallies since he started his first campaign in 2015.

“If we get our people out, it’s over, they can’t do anything about it. … To make you feel a little guilty, we can only blame you,” Trump added, gaining momentum earlier in the evening. courtesy of podcaster Joe Rogan.

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The Harris campaign says internal data shows undecided voters are skewing in their favor, and says it has seen an increase in early voting among core parts of the coalition, including young voters and voters of color.

Trump campaign officials said they were monitoring early voting results, which show more women voted than men. That’s significant considering that Harris led Trump 50% to 38% among female registered voters, according to an October Reuters/Ipsos poll, while Trump led among men 48% to 41%.

“Men must vote!” The world’s richest person Elon Musk, a prominent Trump supporter, wrote on his X social media platform.

Trump’s campaign has outsourced most of its voter work to outside groups, including a group led by Musk that focused on contacting supporters who are not reliably participating in elections, rather than undecided voters.

A Pennsylvania judge ruled that Musk could continue his $1 million giveaway in the state, which a local prosecutor said amounted to an illegal lottery.

Trump has vowed to protect women “whether the women like it or not” and said the decision on whether to ban abortion should be up to individual states, after the conservative majority he cemented on the US Supreme Court in 2022 ended the national right to abortion. abortion. In Reading, he pledged to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports as supporters waved pink “Women for Trump” signs behind him.

A Trump campaign official said they believed the Republican would take North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona, which would still require him to capture one of the Rust Belt battleground states — Michigan, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania — to win the White House to win.

Republicans also appeared to have strong early voting results in Nevada, and were encouraged by robust early voting numbers in North Carolina’s hurricane-ravaged western counties.

“The numbers show that President Trump is going to win this race,” senior adviser Jason Miller told reporters. “We feel really good about where things are.”

Trump and his allies, who falsely claim his 2020 defeat was the result of fraud, have spent months laying the groundwork to challenge the outcome again if he loses. He has promised “retaliation” if elected, spoken of prosecuting his political rivals and described Democrats as the “enemy from within.”

Harris campaign officials said his efforts to accuse fraud will fail. “The voters choose the president, not Donald Trump,” campaign legal counsel Dana Remus told reporters.

(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Philadelphia and Steve Holland in Grand Rapids, Michigan; Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal, Kanishka Singh, Gram Slattery, Alexandra Ulmer, Doina Chiacu, James Oliphant and Trevor Hunnicutt; Writing by Andy Sullivan and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Scott Malone, Howard Goller, Jonathan Oatis, Deepa Babington, Michael Perry and Lincoln Feast.)