election eve trump’s gloom vs. harris’s hope
The tumultuous 2024 election is ending with a paradox that includes America’s fateful choice on the eve of the election.
Former President Donald Trump is already darkening one of the most dystopian closing arguments in modern American history and spewing new and baseless claims that Democrats are cheating.
Vice President Kamala Harris, warning of the dangers of a second Trump term, is claiming momentum and raising optimism and aspirations as she calls a “new generation of leadership in America.”
Voters — more than 75 million who have already cast ballots — are finally facing off in an election that could profoundly change the country and the world, and people on both sides fear for their way of life if their candidate loses.
Quincy Jones, musical titan and entertainment icon, dies at 91.
As Trump and Harris dash through the swing state, nervous tension is rising that could decide a race with an extraordinary twist that will still end up neck and neck in the election.
The former president will start Monday in North Carolina — a state Republicans have long expected a lockdown — before heading to Pennsylvania, which could decide who wins.
He will close out a third presidential bid with a late-night rally in Michigan. Harris, who held her final Michigan rally on Sunday, will spend Monday in another important blue wall state of Pennsylvania, including a big finish in Philadelphia with Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.
The outcry is intensifying by the hour, marking a new attempt to defy the will of the electorate if Trump loses. For example, he falsely claimed in Pennsylvania on Sunday that Democrats were “fighting hard to steal this damn thing” and that voting machines would be tampered with, saying he should not have left the White House in 2021.
Harris is trying to rekindle the sense of joy and potential that permeated her early campaign rallies. At a black church in Detroit on Sunday, she denounced the “hate mongers, fear mongers and anarchists” in reference to her rival. “We will be tested in these next two days,” she said. “We were born for a time like this.”
But the vice president tried to summon the best angels in America’s nature, ambitious notes her Republican adversary dropped long ago. “I have fulfilled America’s promise,” Harris said Saturday in North Carolina. And today, I see the promise of America in everyone here. In all of you, in all of us. We are the promise of America.
History is warning
If Trump wins on Tuesday, he will be the second losing president in a row. He will complete the most shocking political comeback ever after trying to ignite democracy to stay in power after the 2020 election, pleading guilty to a felony and making two attempts on his life this year.
Harris could become the first female president, breaking a nearly 250-year line of male commanders in chief. It would be a stunning feat after she rallied a disillusioned Democratic Party in July when President Joe Biden’s re-election bid was destroyed by ageism.
The sense that no one can predict who will win on the last day of campaigning has raised the stakes of the election.
Polls show no clear leader nationally and in key swing states, reflecting a country as sharply polarized as the race has been since its inception.
But one candidate has made late gains in battleground states including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona and is likely to win more widely than expected.
2022 Trump-created Supreme Court majority against Roe. Democrats are encouraged by an apparently strong early turnout among women voters, with abortion rights a potentially pivotal issue in the first presidential election since Wade’s ouster.
Harris has also worked to correct deformities using traditional methods. The Democratic coalition, in particular, is trying to appeal to black men and Latino voters.
Trump is banking on voters fed up with high food and housing prices and still feeling the sting of cooling inflation, and he has demonized undocumented immigrants to highlight the crisis along the southern border.
The Biden administration struggled for months to recognize the seriousness of each problem and offer effective solutions, meaning the seeds of Harris’ potential defeat may have been planted long ago. And Trump’s team is confident he will eat into traditional minority Democratic constituencies and turn out people who don’t normally vote.
But there are also warning signs from Trump. His behavior is already seen as a fresh attempt to overturn the results if he loses after his behavior after the last election that saw police-beating supporters attack the US Capitol and try to block Biden’s victory certificate.
Harris has said she is prepared to respond if the former president declares an early victory, and his tactic suggests uncertainty over the election could linger for days if neither side gets a clear victory.
The end of Trumpism – or the beginning of a very new era?
This is no ordinary election, largely due to the smoky presence of Trump, already the most disruptive president of the modern era, who is vowing to reign supreme if he returns to the Oval Office.
If he follows through on his promises, the twice-impeached Republican nominee will face his biggest test of America’s administrative, judicial and constitutional institutions in generations during a period in which he vows to exact a personal vendetta.
Trump has drawn the darkest, most authoritarian platform of any presidential candidate in modern memory. He is proposing the largest-ever deportation of immigrants — an operation that would involve law enforcement and possibly the military in a domestic crackdown that would challenge civil liberties.
Emulating the language of some of history’s most notorious tyrants, he has openly contemplated using the US armed forces against his political opponents, whom he has labeled “the enemy from within” and vermin.
Quincy Jones, musical titan and entertainment icon, dies at 91.
The former president has also proposed a transformation of the economy in the name of working Americans who lean toward his populist, nationalist message after decades of globalization have hollowed out their livelihoods.
But his love of rates could backfire on the economy. Trump also plans to dismantle Washington’s bureaucracy and agencies like the Justice Department that stymied him in his first term, and wants to turn them into weapons to dispose of his criminal cases and satisfy his personal and political ambitions.
More than nine years after first entering the presidential fray, Trump may be as politically strong as he’s ever been. He crushed dissent within the GOP and cemented his incredible bond with millions of Americans who believe he speaks for them, confounding elites who hate him.
Yet Harris heads into Election Day with a chance to end the Trump era and deliver a second electoral defeat to a Republican Party that silenced lies and threats to the Constitution in its fanatical pursuit of power.
It gives voters a chance to avoid the confusion and threat to the rule of law that Trump’s own campaign has suggested. The vice president also proposes reforms to improve the lives of working Americans — but his is less revolutionary than Trump’s.
It is also taking promising steps to make housing more affordable, getting price hikes from supermarket giants and guaranteeing better health care at more affordable prices.
Harris risks offering continuity at a time of deep discontent with domestic economic and political realities and growing anxiety about the world on which oppressors are marching.
She has struggled to distinguish herself from the deeply unpopular 81-year-old president, despite presiding over the industrialized world’s strongest economic recovery since the Covid-19 pandemic.
The campaign, which burst into life on a wave of euphoria, is ending with dire warnings that Trump is a fascist who could destroy America’s democratic way of life, alienate America’s allies, and subjugate a dictator in Russia and the country’s vital national image. China wants to emulate.
Way up to 270
Harris’ best path to the presidency runs through the Democratic blue wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. CNN’s Poll of Polls, an average of the past five nonpartisan polls, shows no clear leader among the trio, though CNN/SSRS polls last week showed a narrow edge for Harris in the first two of those states and a tie in the Keystone State.
If she loses Pennsylvania, Harris will need a combination of other swing states, including Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, where poll averages also don’t show a clear leader. If Trump wins Pennsylvania — as he did in 2016 — he could take a big step toward a second term.
The vice president’s campaign claims it is building momentum late in the race. “Experience has shown that closing a presidential campaign with late-deciding voters in double digits and remaining undecided voters favoring you more than your opponent is useful,” Harris consultant David Plouffe wrote on X Friday. .
Democrats received a new wave of optimism Saturday when the final polls from the Des Moines Register and Mediacom showed Harris at 47% and Trump at 44% among likely voters in states they easily won in 2020 and 2016, respectively.
It made a difference. The poll’s 3.4-point margin suggests sampling error and no clear leader in the state.
But findings from previous Iowa polls in September that suggested a shift toward Harris showed the vice president had a strong advantage among women.
If such a pattern is repeated across the country, the vice president could be swept to victory if she can narrow her deficit to Trump, especially among white men.
Trump’s campaign sent out an acerbic memo citing an Iowa poll and a set of New York Times/Siena College polls. And the former president immediately used the new data to claim he was the victim of a rigged election.
“We’ve been waiting nine years for this, and we’ve got two days, and we’ve got all this crap going on with press and fake stuff and fake polls,” he said in Pennsylvania.
But with Election Day just hours away, none of the polls matter anymore. Americans are going to choose them.