Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are pushing their closing messages to voters in swing states on the last day of campaigning before America decides its next president.
Both candidates are in a final sprint across key battleground states, with Harris to campaign in Pennsylvania today and Trump heading to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
The polls suggest the race is still exceptionally close and more than 75 million people have already voted.
There are 50 states in the US but because most of them nearly always vote for the same party, in reality there are just a handful where both candidates stand a chance of winning. These are the places where the election will be won and lost and are known as battleground states or swing states.
Harris-Trump close race in swing states
Right now the leads in the swing states are so small that it’s impossible to know who is really ahead from looking at the polling averages.
Some results may come in more slowly this year due to changes in how individual states – including all seven swing states that will ultimately decide the race – have administered their elections since 2020.
On the other hand, vote counting has been sped up in places like Michigan, and far fewer votes will be cast by mail this time than in the last election, which was held during the Covid pandemic.
In 2020, the election took place on Tuesday 3 November but US TV networks did not declare Joe Biden the winner until late in the morning on Saturday 7 November.
The president-elect will be inaugurated on Monday 20 January 2025, on the grounds of the Capitol complex – the 60th presidential inauguration in US history.
Stakes high
If Trump wins on Tuesday, he will be only the second defeated president to win a nonconsecutive term. He will complete one of the most staggering political comebacks ever after trying to torch democracy to stay in power after the 2020 election, being convicted of a crime and escaping two attempts on his life this year.
Harris could shatter the line of nearly 250 years of male commanders-in-chief and become the first female president. It would be a stunning feat after she unified the demoralized Democratic Party in July when President Joe Biden’s reelection bid was destroyed by the ravages of age.
Democrats experienced a new surge of optimism on Saturday when the last poll of the campaign from the Des Moines Register and Mediacom showed Harris at 47 percent and Trump at 44 percent among likely voters in a state he won easily in 2020 and 2016.
That margin falls within the poll’s 3.4-point margin of sampling error and suggests no clear leader in the state.
But the findings, which suggested a shift toward Harris from the previous Iowa Poll in September, also showed the vice president with a strong advantage among women.
