Donald J. Trump and Kamala Harris closed out their campaigns on Monday in much the same way they started them: The former president claimed that the country was on the brink of ruin even as his rally crowds appeared to dwindle, and the vice president promised a more united future as her supporters chanted, “We’re not going back,” alongside her.
In stop after stop, the presidential rivals essentially offered up two competing versions of reality in the final hours before Election Day. Mr. Trump repeatedly raised the specter of unchecked immigration and the dangers of Democratic policies to crowds in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, with another stop planned in Michigan.
With a comparatively more optimistic message, Ms. Harris opted to crisscross Pennsylvania, which holds 19 electoral votes that could decide the race. At stops in Scranton and Allentown, with evening rallies planned in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Ms. Harris talked about bolstering the economy and restoring federal abortion rights. She asserted that Americans were “exhausted” and ready to move on from the politics of the past decade.
“America is ready for a fresh start,” she said to supporters on a college campus in Allentown, “where we see our fellow Americans not as an enemy but as a neighbor.”
About 30 miles to the southwest, Mr. Trump was broadly portraying undocumented immigrants as mentally ill criminals and calling those accused of crimes “savages” and “animals.”
Both leaned on well-known Hispanic supporters as they tried to rally Latino voters. Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, addressed the Reading audience in Spanish. The pro-Harris rapper Fat Joe, who is Puerto Rican, practically shamed his fellow Latinos in Allentown as he asked, “Where’s your pride?”
But Mr. Trump, reaching the end of a grueling marathon of a campaign that began in 2023, looked visibly weary, battling fatigue in front of listless, smaller crowds. Ms. Harris, still fresh after a three-month sprint, appealed for unity and pressed the contrast to her rival without uttering his name.
“The measure of a true leader is based not on who you beat down,” she said. “It is based on who you lift up.”
Despite the sharply different tones, polls suggest the race remains tight, with the final New York Times/Siena College surveys showing the candidates tied or holding only narrow leads in all of the seven battleground states.
It was, without doubt, going to be an arduous day for two candidates intent on making history. Mr. Trump, who hopes to become the first president in more than 120 years to return to office after an electoral defeat, headed to Pittsburgh after his Reading rally, while his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, was closing his campaign in a Philadelphia suburb, Newtown.
Before Allentown, Ms. Harris, who hopes to make even loftier history as America’s first female president, began a door-knocking effort in Scranton. Her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, was campaigning in Wisconsin and Michigan.
Mr. Trump seemed well aware of the work ahead. “You know we’re going to be doing four of these today, four,” he told a rally audience in Reading that slowly decreased through his 80-minute speech. “They’re big ones.”
His day started in Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, which he won in 2020 but where the latest Times/Siena poll showed Ms. Harris with a slight edge. His voice was raspy, his demeanor fatigued, as he meandered through his remarks. He did not project enormous confidence as he told the crowd, “This will be our final moment.”
“I think we’ve got it under control,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s campaign has rebuffed any concerns over crowd size, pointing to strong early-voting turnout among Republicans as a measure of enthusiasm. But his insistence on large-scale rallies has been having diminishing returns. The campaign has scheduled Mr. Trump in cities and venues that he visited only last month, where supporters have already had a chance to see him. And he has barnstormed North Carolina and Pennsylvania with particular intensity in recent weeks, providing residents with ample glimpses at his message.
In Raleigh, Mr. Trump rehashed familiar grievances about former President Barack Obama, who has been campaigning heavily for Ms. Harris, and the news media. He continued to assail the Biden-Harris administration over its handling of the economy and immigration before making another digression: He said he felt slighted for not receiving credit for the criminal justice overhaul during his presidency.
But Pennsylvania was clearly the focus. Both campaigns insisted on Monday that early-vote totals going into Election Day on Tuesday boded well for their candidates, but Pennsylvania, the most valuable battleground state in the Electoral College, also has the lowest early-vote total.
Fat Joe, whose real name is Joseph Antonio Cartagena, seemed incensed that the race was so close, and that Mr. Trump had shown such strength with voters of color, even after last month’s rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden, when a pro-Trump comedian called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage” and spoke of watermelons and a Black person in the audience.
“If I’m speaking to some undecided Puerto Ricans,” he implored, “what more they got to do to show you who they are?”
For some worried Democrats, the vice president’s final, star-studded rally — planned for the famed “Rocky steps” of the Philadelphia Museum of Art — brought to mind the last Democrat who tried to become the nation’s first female president. Hillary Clinton closed out her 2016 campaign in Philadelphia with presidents past (Bill Clinton), present (Barack Obama), and she hoped, future, only to be beaten in the state — and the nation — by an underdog newcomer, Mr. Trump.
But Pennsylvania is no less important now than it was eight years ago, and Ms. Harris’s aspirations might rest on high turnout from the City of Brotherly Love. She hopes voters will be inspired to come out with the help of the superstars Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin and Oprah Winfrey.
For Ms. Harris, the three-month campaign sprint has been marked by a conscious assemblage of an anti-Trump coalition spanning the ideological spectrum, from former Vice President Dick Cheney on the right to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York on the left.
On Monday, Mr. Cheney’s daughter and perhaps Mr. Trump’s fiercest Republican adversary, former Representative Liz Cheney, appeared on the daytime television show “The View,” to respond to the former president suggesting she should have “nine rifles pointed at her face.”
“He knows what he’s doing,” Ms. Cheney said. “He knows it’s a threat, to intimidate. Obviously the intimidation won’t work.”
On Monday, Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser, said the campaign would declare victory “when we are confident that we cross the 270 threshold” in the Electoral College. But Mr. Miller deflected when asked what measure Mr. Trump — who has never conceded his 2020 loss and spent months trying to overturn it — and his campaign would use to make that determination.
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