With just days to go before the election, Kamala Harris gave a final greeting to voters seeking to balance cheerful optimism with dire warnings about the threat from her Republican rival. her peace.
“We have an opportunity in this election to turn the final page of a decade of Donald Trump, who spent all his time time to try to keep us divided and afraid of each other.” in downtown Atlanta on Saturday.
That was the message Harris delivered at the end of his journey. presidential election campaign backed by growing support from women and young voters, something that seemed unlikely at the beginning of the year.
But Harris now even has a chance to become America’s first female president after four frantic months that began with Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance that forced him to give way to his vice president.
What followed was a frenzied campaign fall in which Harris erased Trump’s polling lead and overcame his fundraising advantage.
the Financial Times poll tracker Harris currently leads the former Republican president nationally by just more than a point.
Importantly, the candidates are in a statistical tie. seven vibrational states capable of deciding the election. That has led many analysts to conclude that America’s next president could be decided by a few thousand voters in a handful of states. Four years ago, Biden won 16 electoral votes in Georgia with a very thin margin of less than 12,000 votes.
Harris and her advisers insist they have momentum going into voting day and that undecided voters making their choices in the final days are disrupting their path.
“Every one of our battleground states is working,” said a senior Harris campaign official. “We continue to see multiple paths to 270,” the official added, referring to the number of electoral college votes needed to win the White House.
Harris crisscrossed the country in the final days of her campaign, hitting every swing state at least once.
On Thursday and Friday, Harris swept Nevada, Arizona and Wisconsin. On Saturday, she flew nonstop from Georgia to North Carolina. On Sunday, she is expected to run through Michigan before wrapping up the final day of the campaign on Monday with three major rallies in Pennsylvania.
“We still have work to do,” Harris told the crowd in Atlanta. “But the thing is that we like to work hard. . . and make no mistake, we will win.”
Harris’s campaign has for weeks sought to craft a message that paints an optimistic vision of America’s future and warns of what it sees as a threat to Trump — who is already skeptical on the results of next week’s election – set for US democracy.
Harris made an appeal to female voters by vowing to restore access to abortion and protect reproductive freedoms that were stripped away after Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices helped overturn Roe vs. Wade in 2022. She extended an olive branch to centrist Republicans disillusioned with Trump, insisting that she would put “country above party” as president .
Harris’s top advisers say the strategy is working, in part because Trump has spent the final days of his campaign grappling with backlash over racist remarks racism and misogyny from speakers in his office. Protest at Madison Square Garden. He sparked controversy with a series of vulgar and inflammatory comments, including musing about how former anti-Trump Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney would react if she were “held at gunpoint.” in the face” and “nine gun barrels were fired at her”.
By contrast, the mood at Harris’ rallies has been relentlessly upbeat, with live music and celebrity appearances serving as warm-ups. At a campaign stop in Atlanta on Saturday, crowds of voters – including many women with their young children – colored homemade signs and assembled friendship bracelets to show their support for Harris.
On Saturday night, she made an unscheduled stop in the Democratic stronghold of New York City to appear on Saturday night live.
Kamala Harris talks to Kamala Harris pic.twitter.com/AJuW7aO7VM
– Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) November 3, 2024
“We are ready for a change,” said Phyllis Hernandez, a 63-year-old voter in Atlanta. “We will not be sent back to the dark ages. We are moving forward with hope and joy.”
A senior Harris campaign official said their own polling showed Trump’s antics were eroding his own support.
“We are winning over the battleground voters who decided last week and we are winning over them by double-digit margins,” the official said.
“We’ve always believed that there are still undecided voters here and that closing this race is really important and we’re seeing that right.”
Harris aides were also buoyed by a Gallup poll this week that showed Democrats have a 10-point advantage over Republicans in power, with 77% of Democrats and independents leaning of Democrats say they are more enthusiastic about voting this year than last year. year, compared to 67% for Republicans.
If Harris wins on Tuesday, it will most likely be by a woman. Her campaign cited data showing that more women than men submitted ballots by mail or in person before election day. Polls have consistently shown that women overwhelmingly support Harris, while a similar percentage of men support Trump.
However, many veteran presidential campaign experts caution that polling and early voting figures in the final days of such a tight race are not necessarily predictive.
“We are all in a dark tunnel. That is the reality,” said Bob Shrum, a longtime Democratic consultant who worked on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign and John Kerry’s 2004 White House bid. know. “But there are some emerging signs that she is doing very well.”
The Harris team asserts that its hundreds of millions of dollars in spending on targeted advertising and a strong “ground game” — a vast network of campaign volunteers and organizers party officials across the country — should help them attract enough voters on Tuesday to push Harris over the edge.
To date, the campaign has knocked on more than 13 million doors across seven battleground states, Harris’ senior official said. The Gallup poll found that 42% of registered voters nationwide said they had been contacted by the Harris campaign, compared with 35% who said they had heard from Trump’s team.
“She got the job done. She gave what people needed to hear,” said Brandi Wyche, chairwoman of the local Democratic party in DeKalb County, just outside Atlanta, who has worked for months to rally support for Harris. “Now it’s just a matter of making sure to get people out to vote to elect her as our next president.”
Additional reporting by James Politi and Steff Chávez in Washington
