Vice president Kamala Harris was barnstorming the crucial state of Pennsylvania Monday as former President Trump hopscotched three battleground states on the eve of Election Day.
With many polls still deadlocked, Harris was spending the entire day with four rallies in Pennsylvania, which is considered the most pivotal of the seven battleground states with 19 electoral votes.
Trump started the final day in Raleigh, North Carolina, a state he narrowly won four years ago.
“We’re not gonna take it anymore. Kamala, you’re fired, get the hell out,” Trump declared at the Raleigh rally, intentionally mispronouncing his rival’s name.
Trump is expected to speak later in the day in the Pennsylvania cities of Reading and Pittsburgh — both of which will see separate rallies for Harris — and end with a stop in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Donald Trump attends a campaign rally in Georgia on Sunday. (AP)
The Democratic candidate, who has been greeted by sprawling and enthusiastic packed crowds in recent days, will cap her historic race to become the first Black woman president with a star-studded late night rally in Philadelphia.
Oprah Winfrey and Lady Gaga are expected to join the vice president on stage in the City of Brotherly Love, where Democrats hope to run up the score with a coalition of urban Black and Latino voters and suburban moderates who have swung hard to the left in the Trump era.
The emphasis on Pennsylvania is driven by simple math — for both campaigns.
With 270 electoral votes needed to win, Harris could win the presidency by holding three Rust Belt states President Biden won in 2020: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Even if she loses all the southern swing states, the electoral votes from these so-called blue wall states would clinch the race for Harris.
Polls say Pennsylvania is the closest of the Rust Belt battleground states.
Kamala Harris speaks at a rally in Michigan on Sunday. (AP)
Trump needs to sweep all the Sun Belt swing states, including Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada, and pick off one of the blue wall states, with Pennsylvania being his best shot there.
The polls have suggested some movement toward Harris in the campaigns final days. Trump’s campaign has been rocked by blunders like a comedian at his blockbuster Madison Square Garden rally deriding Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage” and Trump’s offensive claim that he would be a protector of women, “whether the women like it or not.”
Harris has stuck to a positive message and pointedly stopped even mentioning Trump’s name in her speeches starting Sunday.
Whoever wins, the gender gap is expected to be the widest ever, with Harris eyeing a landslide win among women while Trump holds a huge edge with men, especially white men without a college degree.
About 77 million Americans already have voted early, either by mail or in person, about half of the total turnout in 2020.
The two campaigns are sparring over who holds the advantage from those numbers.
Republicans say their voters are out-voting Democrats and comprise a much higher share of the early vote than they did four years ago in the battleground states.
Democrats counter that Republicans were always expected to return in droves to previous voting methods this year after ditching early voting in 2020 when Trump instructed his followers to only vote in person on Election Day.
Polls say the race has been extraordinarily stable since Harris exploded onto the political stage when Biden dropped out of the race on July 21 and handed the Democratic baton to her.
Harris quickly forged a modest polling lead and by all accounts beat Trump handily in the only face-to-face debate on Sept. 10. But the race settled back into a virtual dead heat and has barely shifted ever since.
Harris is vying to make three historic firsts as the first woman, first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to reach the Oval Office. But she has not stressed the trailblazing nature of her run, instead focusing on bread-and-butter plans to improve the economy and restore abortion rights.
A Trump win would amount to the biggest political comeback in modern American history after he lost the 2020 election, tried to overturn that loss with his “Stop the Steal” effort that culminated in a crowd of his supporters storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The former reality TV star and real-estate mogul is also running for his freedom. Already a convicted felon, Trump likely needs a win to stave off conviction and potential imprisonment in four criminal cases.