Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump (L) and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris (R).
Credit: Reuters Photo
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris closed out their campaigns Monday in starkly different moods: The former president, appearing drained at arenas that were not filled, claimed that the country was on the brink of ruin, while the vice president promised a more united future as energized supporters chanted alongside her, "We're not going back."
In stop after stop, the presidential rivals essentially offered up two competing versions of reality in the final hours before Election Day. Trump repeatedly raised the specter of unchecked immigration and the dangers of Democratic policies as he spoke to crowds in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, with another stop planned in Michigan.
With a comparatively more optimistic message, Harris crisscrossed Pennsylvania, which holds 19 electoral votes that could decide the race. Stopping in Scranton, Allentown and Pittsburgh before a nighttime rally in Philadelphia, 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, Trump was broadly portraying immigrants in the country without legal permission as mentally ill criminals and calling those accused of crimes "savages" and "animals."
Both leaned on Hispanic supporters as they tried to rally Latino voters. Pro-Harris rapper Fat Joe, who is Puerto Rican, practically shamed his fellow Latinos in Allentown as he asked, "Where's your pride?" Trump, still facing fallout from his rally in New York at which a comedian called Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage," brought Roberto Clemente Jr., the son of the Puerto Rican baseball legend, to the stage in Pittsburgh.
But Trump, reaching the end of a grueling marathon of a campaign that began in 2022, looked visibly weary, battling fatigue in front of listless crowds. Harris, still appearing 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.