Harris and Trump make a furious final push before Election Day
About 77 million Americans already have voted early.
A presidential campaign that has seen a felony trial, an incumbent president being pushed off the ticket and multiple assassination attempts comes down to a final sprint across a handful of states on Election Day eve.
Kamala Harris is spending Monday in Pennsylvania, whose 19 electoral votes offer the largest prize among the states expected to determine the Electoral College outcome.
The vice president and Democratic nominee will visit working-class areas, including Allentown, and end with a late-night Philadelphia rally that includes Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.
Donald Trump kicked off four rallies across three states by addressing a roaring crowd in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he declared: “With North Carolina, I’ve always gotten there.”
“It’s ours to lose,” he said.
Mr Trump spoke on his tough immigration policies and ticked through some of his complaints on his Democratic opponents.
Mr Trump has later events in Reading, Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh — both of which Ms Harris is also visiting.
The Republican nominee and former president ends his campaign the way he ended the first two, with a late-night event in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
There were plenty of empty seats at the JS Dorton Arena, a 5,000-seat venue with additional seating on the floor in the Raleigh arena where Mr Trump kicked off his campaign day.
About 77 million Americans already have voted early. Either result on Election Day will yield a historic outcome.
A Trump victory would make him the first incoming president to have been indicted and convicted of a felony, after his hush-money trial in New York.
He will gain the power to end other federal investigations pending against him.
Mr Trump would also become only the second president in history to win non-consecutive White House terms, after Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century.
Ms Harris is vying to become the first woman, first black woman and first person of South Asian descent to reach the Oval Office — four years after she broke the same barriers in national office by becoming President Joe Biden’s second in command.
The vice president ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket after Mr Biden’s disastrous performance in a June debate set into motion his withdrawal from the race — one of a series of convulsions that have hit this year’s campaign.
Mr Trump survived by millimetres a would-be assassin’s bullet at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. His Secret Service detail foiled a second attempt in September, when a gunman had set up a rifle as Mr Trump golfed at one of his courses in Florida.
Ms Harris, 60, has pitched herself as a generational change from 81-year-old Mr Biden and Mr Trump, who is 78.
She has emphasised her support for abortion rights after the 2022 Supreme Court decision that ended the constitutional right to abortion services, and she has regularly noted the former president’s role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
At her first stop in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Ms Harris talked about once being a longshot while running for San Francisco district attorney in 2002 and how she “used to campaign with my ironing board”.
“I’d walk to the front of the grocery store, outside, and I would stand up my ironing board because, you see, an ironing board makes a really great standing desk,” Ms Harris said, recalling how she would tape her posters to the outside of the board, fill the top with flyers and “require people to talk to me as they walked in and out”.
In Allentown, home to tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans, the vice president will hold a rally with rapper Fat Joe.
Later, she’s visiting a Puerto Rican restaurant in Reading with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Both Fat Joe, whose real name is Joseph Cartagena, and Ms Ocasio-Cortez, are of Puerto Rican heritage.
The stops come after a comic at a recent Donald Trump rally suggested that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage”.
As recently as Sunday, Mr Trump renewed his false claims that US elections are rigged against him, mused about violence against journalists and said he “ shouldn’t have left” the White House in 2021 — dark turns that have overshadowed another anchor of his closing argument: “Kamala broke it. I will fix it.”
The election is likely to be decided across seven states. Mr Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016 only to see them flip to Mr Biden in 2020. North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada add the Sun Belt swathe of the presidential battleground map.
