washington – A presidential campaign that ended with a felony trial, the delisting of a sitting president and multiple assassination attempts is turning into a final push in a handful of states on the eve of Election Day.

Kamala Harris will spend all of Monday in Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral delegates who give the biggest 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 culminate with a late-night rally in Philadelphia that includes Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.

Donald Trump is planning four rallies in three states, starting in Raleigh, North Carolina, with two stops in Pennsylvania, along with events in Reading and Pittsburgh. The Republican candidate and former president wrapped up his campaign the same way he did his first two, with an event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, late Monday night.

Approximately 77 million Americans I already voted It’s early, but Harris and Trump are pushing for millions more supporters to show up Tuesday. Both results on Election Day will be historic.

Trump’s victory would make him the first president to be indicted and convicted of a serious crime following a silence trial in New York. He will have the authority to end any other federal investigations pending against him. Trump would also be the second president in history to not serve consecutive terms in the White House, following Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century.

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 breaking the same barriers in national office as President Joe Biden’s second-in-command.

The vice president rose to the top of the Democratic ticket after Biden’s disastrous performance in a debate in June prompted his withdrawal from the race. This was just one of a series of shakeups affecting this year’s campaign.

Trump survived an assassin’s bullet by millimeters at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The Secret Service team thwarted a second attempt in September, when a gunman fired his rifle while Trump was playing golf at one of his Florida courses.

Harris, 60, downplayed the historic nature of her candidacy, which came only after the 81-year-old president ended her reelection bid in June after her debate against 78-year-old Trump highlighted questions about Biden’s age.

Instead, Harris has cast herself as a generational changeling, emphasizing her support for abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision ending the constitutional right to abortion services and regularly noting the former president’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol pulled. Harris, who has built a coalition that includes progressives like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney, has called Trump a threat to democracy and late in the campaign even embraced criticism that Trump was accurately described as a “fascist.” . .”

By Monday, Harris had mostly stopped mentioning Trump. As he promises to solve problems and reach consensus, he strikes an almost entirely optimistic tone, reminiscent of the opening days of his campaign when he adopted the “politics of joy” and the campaign theme of “Freedom.”

“From the very beginning, our campaign wasn’t about being against something, it was about being for something,” Harris said Sunday evening at Michigan State University.

Renewing his slogans of “Make America Great Again” and “America First,” Trump has made his hardline approach on immigration and harsh criticism of Harris and Biden the mainstay of his argument for a second administration. He crushed the Democrats over an inflationary economy and promised to create an economic “golden age”, end international conflicts and close the US southern border.

But Trump has also frequently complained about being impeached after trying to overturn Biden’s victory and has repeatedly denigrated the country he wants to rule again as a “failed nation.” As recently as Sunday, he renewed false claims that the US election was rigged against him, reflected on violence against journalists and said he “shouldn’t have left” the White House in 2021; These dark turns overshadowed another mainstay of the closing argument: “Kamala broke it. I will fix it.”

The election is expected to be decided in seven states. Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016, but saw them flip to Biden in 2020. North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada added the Sun Belt region to the presidential battleground map.

Trump won North Carolina twice and lost Nevada twice. He won Arizona and Georgia in 2016 but saw them defect to the Democrats in 2020.

Harris’ team has predicted confidence in recent days, pointing to a large gender gap in early voting data and research showing late-deciding voters paving the way. They also believe in the power of their campaign infrastructure. This weekend, the Harris campaign had more than 90,000 volunteers helping rally voters and knocked on more than 3 million doors in battleground states. Still, Harris’ aides insist she remains the underdog.

Trump’s team also projected confidence, arguing that the former president’s populist appeal would attract young and working-class voters from racial and ethnic backgrounds. The idea is that Trump could assemble an unlikely Republican coalition even as other traditional GOP blocs (especially college-educated voters) become more Democratic.

___

AP White House Correspondent Zeke Miller contributed to this report.