Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump made their final pitches to voters Monday, November 4 in the same part of Pennsylvania at roughly the same time, spending the last full day of the presidential campaign in a state that could make or break their chances.
Focusing on Pennsylvania’s southeast corner, Trump took the stage in Reading, about 30 miles from Allentown, where Harris held her own event about half an hour later. “If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole ball of wax,” Trump said. “It’s over.”
Indeed, a Trump victory in Pennsylvania, flipping its 19 Electoral College votes, would puncture the Democrats’ “blue wall” and make it harder for Harris to win the necessary 270 votes.
Then in Pittsburgh, Trump delivered what his campaign aides described as his closing argument after his previous attempt – a mass rally at Madison Square Garden in New York –was derailed by crude and racist jokes. He has also veered off message with falsehoods about voter fraud and invocations of violence.
“Over the past four years, Americans have suffered one catastrophic failure, betrayal and humiliation after another,” said the Republican nominee, sounding raspy yet energetic after speaking for hours each day.
“We do not have to settle for weakness, incompetence, decline and decay,” he went on. “With your vote tomorrow, we can fix every single problem our country faces and lead America, and indeed the while world, to new heights of glory.”
The crowd exploded in cheers when the Republican nominee said the country should tell Harris, “You’re fired,” his catchphrase from The Apprenticethe reality television show that made him a nationally recognized star.
Trump started Monday in North Carolina and he’s scheduled to hold his last rally of the election in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he concluded his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
‘Make no mistake, we will win’
Harris, the Democratic nominee, is spending all of Monday in Pennsylvania, and she was en route to Pittsburgh while Trump was speaking there. She’s holding her final rally in Philadelphia later in the evening.
“This is it,” Harris said in Pittsburgh in front of the Carrie Furnaces, a historic steel facility that nodded to the city’s industrial legacy. “Tomorrow is Election Day and the momentum is on our side.”
“We must finish strong,” she added. “Make no mistake, we will win.”
The Democratic nominee spent all of Monday in Pennsylvania, saying earlier Monday, “We need everyone in Pennsylvania to vote,” she said. “You are going to make the difference in this election.”
Read more Subscribers only Journey through the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania
In addition to Allentown, Harris visited Scranton – the birthplace of President Joe Biden – and Reading. She had a stop planned in Pittsburgh before ending with a late-night Philadelphia rally that was to include Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.
“Are you ready to do this?” Harris yelled in Scranton, with a large handmade “VOTE FOR FREEDOM” sign behind her and a similar “VOTE” banner to her side.
Trump went first to North Carolina before visiting Reading. He then headed to Pittsburgh, at the opposite end of the state, before concluding in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he will hold his last campaign rally in the same place he concluded his 2016 and 2020 runs.
Southeast Pennsylvania is home to thousands of Latinos, including a sizable Puerto Rican population. Harris and her allies have repeatedly hit Trump for a comedian’s dig at Puerto Rico during the former president’s marquee Madison Square Garden event. The comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
“It was absurd,” said German Vega, a Dominican American who lives in Reading and became a U.S. citizen in 2015. “It bothered so many people – even many Republicans. It wasn’t right, and I feel that Trump should have apologized to Latinos.”
‘Is the border going to be safe?’
But Emilio Feliciano, 43, waited outside Reading’s Santander Arena for a chance to take a photo of Trump’s motorcade. He dismissed the comments about Puerto Rico despite his family being Puerto Rican, saying he cares about the economy and that’s why he will vote for Trump.
“Is the border going to be safe? Are you going to keep crime down? That’s what I care about,” he said.
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Harris told the crowd, “I stand here proud of my long-standing commitment to Puerto Rico and her people.”
“And I will be a president for all Americans,” she said, adding that “momentum is on our side. Can you feel it?”
Trump, meanwhile, stuck to talking about his proposed crackdown on immigration. He called to the stage Patty Morin, the mother of 37-year-old Rachel Morin, who was found dead a day after she went missing during a trip to go hiking. Officials say the suspect in her death, Victor Antonio Martinez Hernandez, entered the US illegally after allegedly killing a woman in his home country of El Salvador.
About 77 million Americans have voted early. A victory by either side would be unprecedented.
Trump winning 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 the second president in history to win nonconsecutive White House terms, after Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century.
As for Harris, she 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.
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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 hit this year’s campaign.
‘The other guy’
Trump survived by millimeters an assassination attempt 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 US 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.”
Read more Subscribers only Harris pits her restraint against ‘petty tyrant’ Trump in last major speech
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 Dillon 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.”
