(The Center Square) – Donald Trump and Kamala Harris closed their Election Day eve rally schedules more than 700 miles apart.
For voters, it might as well be a million.
Harris, the nation’s second-in-command, spent her day crisscrossing Pennsylvania in one final push to court Democratic and independent voters in a state considered crucial to victory on Tuesday.
It’s been 106 days since President Joe Biden withdrew from the race after a debate against Republican challenger Trump laid bare the cognitive decline many critics argue his team fought hard to hide.
Harris, with her boss’s support, clinched the official nomination in August after a unanimous vote from delegates present for a virtual roll call.
In the months since, she’s branded herself as the child of divorced immigrants who grew up working class in Oakland, Calif., before graduating from college on the East Coast. In stump speeches, the vice president recalls attending civil rights rallies with her parents while in a stroller and says she is incensed when people face injustice.
It was a message she shared with voters across the commonwealth on Monday, particularly in cities with large Latino populations, many of whom Democrats hope to win over after a comedian at a Trump rally in New York City called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.”
Hitting the familiar notes of her Oct. 29 “closing argument” at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., Harris promised to “seek common sense solutions.”
“I am not looking to score political points,” she said in Allentown on Tuesday. “I am looking to make progress. It is my pledge to you to listen to those who will be impacted by the decisions to make, to listen to experts and to listen to people who disagree with me. Because I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy.”
Meanwhile, Trump passed the Harris campaign like a ship in the night, flying from Raleigh, N.C. and touching down in Reading, Pa., and Pittsburgh before wrapping up at a late-night rally in Grand Rapids, Mich. – nearly two years after he first announced his 2024 candidacy.
His message hasn’t wavered: what the Biden administration broke, he will fix.
“She allowed a man who was grossly incompetent to remain in the most important position of any country in the world,” Trump said on stage in Pittsburgh. “When they’re talking nuclear weapons and they’re talking wars and she still says, ‘Oh no I didn’t notice anything wrong.’”
“If she didn’t notice anything wrong, then she’s got a bigger problem than he has,” he added.
Despite his privileged upbringing and celebrity status, Trump’s message of economic prosperity and border security has resonated with voters, according to recent polling from The Center Square.
But the billionaire’s penchant for coarse remarks is what reviles Democratic critics most, with many happy to paint the former president as a “fascist dictator.”
It’s also the kind of rhetoric that riles his base, who appear to be turning out in record numbers across the country.
Which, of course, brings the candidates back to the commonwealth, the biggest of all swing state prizes on Election Night. Nationally, the RealClear Polling average shows the candidates tied.
Among the seven battlegrounds – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – Trump leads by an average of 0.9 points. Between them there are 93 electoral college votes.
