In battle against Trump, Harris crisscrosses biggest of the battlegrounds on election eve

ALLENTOWN, PA. – Vice President Kamala Harris is urging her supporters to “get out to vote… let’s win.”

The Democratic presidential nominee, at a canvass kickoff Monday afternoon at a ski area in Scranton, Pennsylvania, told the crowd, “Let’s get to work. Twenty-four hours to go.”

On the final full day of campaigning ahead of her Election Day face-off against former President Trump, the Democratic Party nominee was crisscrossing the largest of the battleground states.

Following her event near Scranton, Harris headed south to Allentown, a majority Latino city, to hold her first rally of the day.

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The vice president was then scheduled to make a stop at a Puerto Rican restaurant in Reading, where she would be joined by Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a rising Democratic Party star, and by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the high-profile member of progressive and diverse House members known as the Squad.

The spotlight on courting Pennsylvania’s crucial Puerto Rican voters comes as polls suggest Trump has made gains with Latinos, and in the wake of a controversy sparked by a racist joke by a comedian who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” as he spoke ahead of the former president last month at a large rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

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Harris will close out her election eve swing through Pennsylvania with two star-studded rallies – an evening one in Pittsburgh and a late-night one in Philadelphia, by the famed “Rocky Steps” outside the city’s Art Museum.

But Harris doesn’t have the state to herself on this final full day of campaigning.

Trump, who is also making stops Monday in battlegrounds North Carolina and Michigan, holds two rallies in Pennsylvania – in the afternoon in Reading followed by an evening one in Pittsburgh. And he held a rally Sunday in Lititz, outside of Lancaster.

“With your vote, we’re going to win Pennsylvania. And we’re going to defeat Kamala and the radical left,” the former president said at his Reading campaign event.

And he told his supporters “we’ve been waiting for this. I’ve been waiting four years for this.”

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With 19 electoral votes up for grabs, it’s the biggest prize among the seven key battlegrounds whose razor-thin margins decided President Biden’s 2020 election victory over Trump and are likely to determine if Trump or Harris succeeds Biden in the White House.

“Pennsylvania is the one state that it’s hard to see someone losing and then still winning the presidential race,” Mark Harris, a Pittsburgh-based longtime Republican national strategist and ad maker, told Fox News. “It’s clearly ground zero.”

Harris, a veteran of multiple GOP presidential campaigns, called Pennsylvania “a big tipping point state.”

And pointing to the state’s major cities – Philadelphia and Pittsburgh – its electorally crucial suburban areas, and its vast swath of rural counties, Harris highlighted, “I think it’s a good microcosm of America.”

Harris, Trump, and their running mates – GOP vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance and his Democratic counterpart, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz – as well as top surrogates, have repeatedly stopped in the state this summer and autumn.

And while the campaigns and their allied super PACs have poured resources into all seven battlegrounds, more money has been spent to run spots in Pennsylvania than any of the other swing states, according to figures from AdImpact, a top national ad tracking firm.

Pennsylvania, along with Michigan and Wisconsin, are the three Rust Belt states that make up the Democrats’ so-called “Blue Wall.”

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The party reliably won all three states for a quarter-century before Trump narrowly captured them in the 2016 election to win the White House.

Four years later, in 2020, Biden carried all three states by razor-thin margins to put them back in the Democrats’ column and defeated Trump.

A New York Times/Siena College poll in Pennsylvania conducted last Tuesday through Saturday and released on Sunday indicated Harris and Trump deadlocked at 48% among likely voters in the state. It was the latest survey to indicate a tied or margin-of-error race in the Keystone State. 

Senior Harris campaign officials, taking questions from reporters on Sunday evening, noted that roughly three-quarters of Keystone State voters will cast ballots on Tuesday “because unlike other states, the guidelines, and availability of early voting is just more limited in Pennsylvania.”

But they added that when it comes to the early vote in the state, “we really like what we’re seeing.”

And they predicted that “we expect in Pennsylvania, we’ll have a very strong Election Day.”

The Harris campaign also confirmed to Fox News on Monday that the vice president made an intentional choice while stumping in swing state Michigan on Sunday not to mention Trump by name. Senior campaign officials say the plan is to “close fully positive”.

On Monday, Harris called Trump “the other guy” a couple of times in her comments at the Scranton event.

But Pennsylvania is the state where Trump survived an assassination attempt in July – two days before the start of the Republican National Convention. And the former president returned to the site in Butler, in the western part of the state, for a massive rally last month.

While Harris closes out her campaign with a late-night rally in Philadelphia, Trump will be in Grand Rapids, in battleground Michigan, for his final rally. For Trump, it’s tradition. He closed out his 2016 and 2020 campaigns in the southwestern Michigan city.

Trump campaign senior officials told Fox News they were cautiously optimistic as they pointed to early voting leads in some of the key battlegrounds.

And they argued that the Democrats’ early voting advantage in Pennsylvania is substantially behind where it was in 2020 and wouldn’t be enough to withstand the Election Day vote. 

Boosting the GOP’s early vote success is a concerted effort for two years by the Republican National Committee and state parties to encourage Republicans to be comfortable with early voting, absentee balloting and voting by mail. But just as important, after years of heavily criticizing early voting and blaming it for his unproven claims that his 2020 election loss to Biden was rigged, Trump has now embraced early voting.

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Meanwhile, Trump, as he has in recent days, on Sunday once again argued without providing proof that the Democrats were trying to cheat.

“They are fighting so hard to steal this damn thing,” the former president charged at his Pennsylvania rally.

And later, at his rally in North Carolina, he also reiterated his claim that “we have a big lead. We have a big lead. The fake news, they don’t tell you this. We have a big, beautiful lead.”

Responding, Harris told reporters on Sunday, “I would ask in particular people who have not yet voted to not fall for his tactic, which I think includes suggesting to people that if they vote, their vote won’t matter. Suggesting to people that somehow the integrity of our voting system is not intact so that they don’t vote.”

“It is meant to distract from the fact that we have and support free and fair elections in our country,” Harris argued. “We did in 2020. He lost.”

The Harris campaign on Sunday night also touted its very formidable get-out-the-vote operation, highlighting that it had more than 90,000 volunteers over the weekend helping to turn out voters, and that they knocked on more than 3 million doors in the key battlegrounds.

Fox News Jacqui Heinrich and Aishah Hasnie contributed to this report

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