RALEIGH, N.C. — A presidential campaign that has careened through 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.
Women for Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump show their support as he arrives to speak during a campaign rally at J.S. Dorton Arena, Monday, Nov. 4, 2024, in Raleigh, N.C.
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.
Trump spoke on his tough immigration policies and ticked through some of his complaints on his Democratic opponents. He also seemed to reference the video that nearly sank his 2016 campaign as he expressed amazement at two giant mechanical arms that caught Elon Musk’s reusable rocket — “like you grab your beautiful baby.”
“See, I’ve gotten much better. Years ago, I would have said something else. But I’ve learned,” Trump said, prompting laughs from the crowd. “I would have been a little bit more risqué.”
The late stages of the 2016 campaign saw the surfacing of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by their genitals.
Trump has later events in Reading, Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh — both of which 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 J.S. Dorton Arena, a 5,000-seat venue with additional seating on the floor in the Raleigh arena where Trump kicked off his campaign day. One attendee, Ebony Coots, said she regretted voting for Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 and is now backing Trump — but is nervous about Tuesday's election.
“You know, actually, I might try to go to another planet,” Coots, a 48-year-old delivery driver, said if Harris were to win.
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. 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.
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 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.
Trump survived by millimeters 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 Trump golfed at one of his courses in Florida.
Harris, 60, has pitched herself as a generational change from 81-year-old Biden and Trump, who is 78. She's emphasized 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 Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Assembling a coalition ranging from progressives such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney, Harris has called Trump a threat to democracy and late in the campaign even embraced the critique that Trump is accurately described as a “ fascist.”
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks with reporters on board Air Force Two at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport in Detroit, Monday Nov. 4, 2024, before departing to Pennsylvania.
Heading into Monday, Harris has mostly stopped mentioning Trump by name, calling him instead “the other guy.” She is promising to solve problems and seek consensus.
Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillion said on a call with reporters that not saying Trump’s name was deliberate because voters "want to see in their leader an optimistic, hopeful, patriotic vision for the future.”
At her first stop in Scranton, Pennsylvania, 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,” 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 Ocasio-Cortez. Both Fat Joe, whose real name is Joseph Cartagena, and Ocasio-Cortez, are of Puerto Rican heritage.
Attendees holding the flag of Puerto Rico cheer as Allentown, Pa. Mayor Matt Tuerk speaks during a campaign rally for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in Memorial Hall at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., Monday, Nov. 4, 2024.
The stops come after a comic at a recent Donald Trump rally suggested that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.”
Standing in line for Harris’ Allentown rally, 54-year-old Ron Kessler, an Air Force veteran and Republican-turned-Democrat, said he plans to vote for just the second time in his life. Kessler said that, for a long time, he didn’t vote, thinking the country “would vote for the correct candidate."
But "now that I’m older and much more wiser, I believe it’s important, it’s my civic duty. And it’s important that I vote for myself and I vote for the democracy and the country.”
As recently as Sunday, Trump renewed his false claims that U.S. 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. Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016 only to see them flip to Biden in 2020. North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada add the Sun Belt swath of the presidential battleground map.
Harris’ team has projected confidence in recent days, pointing to a large gender gap in early voting data and research showing late-deciding voters have broken her way. They also believe in the strength of their campaign infrastructure. This weekend, the Harris campaign had more than 90,000 volunteers helping turn out voters — and knocked on more than 3 million doors across the battleground states. Still, Harris aides have insisted she remains the underdog.
Trump's campaign says it's feeling confident as well, arguing that the former president's populist appeal will attract younger and working-class voters across racial and ethnic lines. The idea is that Trump can amass an atypical Republican coalition, even as other traditional GOP blocks — notably college-educated voters — become more Democratic.
Superville reported from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Barrow reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Makiya Seminera in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Zeke Miller, Will Weissert and Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this report.
Election 2024: Voting in America
To help make sense of the way America picks a president, this special series is examining and explaining the ins and outs of U.S. elections.
In the 2024 general election, the AP will declare winners in nearly 2,000 uncontested races, compared with about 4,500 contested races.
Before there was a FiveThirtyEight model, or a New York Times election night needle, or 13 keys revealing “how presidential elections really work,” there was an economist named Louis Bean.
As thousands of counties and towns report vote totals, it can be hard to figure out when the results reported so far will reflect the outcome.
It is the concept of random selection that allows a relatively small group of survey participants to represent the country as a whole.
Polls are useful tools, but it's important not to overstate their accuracy. After all, a polling organization can't talk to every single person in the country.
Elections are human exercises that, despite all the laws and rules governing how they should run, can sometimes appear to be messy.
Officials seek to demystify a process that in recent years faced intense scrutiny, misinformation and false claims of widespread fraud.
There have been 36 recounts in statewide general elections since America's most famous one in 2000.
A few bellwether counties in the key battleground states are likely to decide the outcome — as they did the past two presidential elections.
The Electoral College is the unique American system of electing presidents. It is different from the popular vote, and it has an outsize impact on how candidates win campaigns.
An uncommon system of voting could be central to which party controls the U.S. House this fall — or even the presidency.
"This decentralized nature of the elections is itself a deterrent," said Republican Trey Grayson, a former Kentucky secretary of state and the advisory board chair of the Secure Elections Project.
The few counties that have attempted the massive task to count ballots by hand have found the process more time-consuming, expensive and inaccurate than expected.
Voting machines have been at the center of a web of conspiracy theories, with false claims that they were manipulated to steal the presidency from Donald Trump.
So you want to cast a ballot on Election Day? Or maybe vote by mail? It helps to know the rules.
The Associated Press has created a series of videos explaining how elections work in the United States.
Roughly 50 years ago, about 95% of voters cast their ballots in person on Election Day. That number has fallen gradually as states have provided Americans with more options.
Explaining Election Day: Understanding the processes from voting to declaring winners
The Associated Press has created a series of videos explaining how elections work in the United States.
It's important to remember on election night don't be fooled by early returns. They won't necessarily be reflective of how the race is going t…
Voting machines have been at the center of a web of conspiracy theories since the 2020 election, with false claims that they were manipulated …
Donald Trump continues to blame his 2020 election loss on voter fraud. To be clear, there was no widespread fraud or cheating, and Joe Biden w…
Administering an election is a balancing act. It requires making it easy for as many voters as possible to participate, tabulating and releasi…
After an election, vote results tell you who won, but they don't tell you about the people who voted in that election, what they thought of th…
Some statewide races will be so lopsided that The Associated Press will be able to declare a winner before any of the results are released. Th…
Figuring out who won any election once voting has concluded essentially boils down to two fundamental questions: how many votes have been cast…
The Associated Press has been counting the vote in US elections since 1848, and today it is a massive operation. The AP will send out about 40…
AP has a dedicated decision team of election analysts and researchers. Preparation begins months before Election Day. Analysts study past elec…
One question will be asked over and over again on election night: who won? The Associated Press will answer that question for nearly 7,000 rac…
Unlike many countries, U.S. elections are highly decentralized and include long lists of races. Elections for president and Congress all the w…
Four years of Donald Trump's false claims about a stolen 2020 election have kindled growing suspicion of voting machines among conspiracy theo…
There will be races this year that are so close that election officials will have to recount the votes to make sure they have the correct outc…
The U.S. general election this November will decide the country’s direction, but it is far from a nationally administered contest. The 50 stat…
In the United States, we actually select the president based on the outcome of the Electoral College vote. That is a vote of 538 electors, tha…
Voters today have some options in terms of how they vote and when they vote. The main choices are voting in person at a polling place on Elect…
