Unlock the US Election Countdown newsletter for free
The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will use their final day on the campaign trail stumping for votes in Pennsylvania, the presidential election’s biggest battleground state where polls continue to show the candidates in a dead heat.
The state has 19 electoral votes and has been long viewed as key for both candidates’ path to the White House, with Trump winning there in his successful 2016 campaign but losing by 80,000 votes out of nearly 7mn cast four years ago.
The focus on the biggest swing state in the campaign’s waning hours is a sign of how both the Democratic vice-president and Republican former president are looking for every possible vote in an election that surveys suggest will be decided by a razor-thin margin.
The Financial Times poll tracker shows the candidates in a statistical tie in all seven swing states, which stretch from the eastern seaboard to the industrial Midwest to the western sunbelt.
In the campaign’s final days, Democrats have been cheered by what they believe is a decided shift in polling towards Harris — including a surprising lead in a much-watched survey of Iowa that showed her ahead in what many analysts believed was a solid state for Trump. Aides to the former president dismissed the poll as an outlier.
More than 78mn Americans have already voted early, either in-person or by mail, according to the leading tracker of pre-election day voting at the University of Florida. At least as many are expected to turn out on election day on Tuesday.
In her final push, Harris is scheduled to make five stops in Pennsylvania on Monday — including two large rallies in the state’s biggest cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia — while Trump will hold his rallies in Pittsburgh and Reading, a mid-sized city in south-east Pennsylvania with a large Latino population, before capping off the day with a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Michigan is another of the too-close-to-call swing states. Trump held his final campaign rallies in Grand Rapids in 2016, when he defeated Hillary Clinton, and 2020, when he lost his re-election bid to Joe Biden.
Harris campaigned in Michigan on Sunday, ending the day with a rally at Michigan State University in East Lansing, where she insisted she had the wind in her sails.
“We have momentum, it is on our side. Can you feel it?” she asked the crowd of thousands. “We have the momentum because our campaign is tapping into the ambitions, the aspirations and the dreams of the American people, because we are optimistic and excited about what we can do together.”
The Iowa poll and a handful of other pre-election surveys convinced some investors to pare their bets on a Trump victory, with the dollar weakening and Treasuries rallying on Monday.
The dollar fell 0.5 per cent against a basket of major currencies, putting it on course for its biggest one-day drop since August. The euro was 0.5 per cent higher against the US currency at $1.09. Yields on US government debt, which move inversely to prices, were lower and the Mexico peso strengthened.
Harris has returned to her optimistic tone in the final stretch of her campaign after spending much of the previous week warning of Trump’s threat to democratic institutions. In her remarks on Sunday night, she notably did not reference her Republican opponent by name.
Trump, meanwhile, has doubled down on divisive rhetoric in the home straight, calling Democrats “demonic”, saying he should never have left the White House when he lost to Biden in 2020, and musing he “wouldn’t mind” if an assailant had to “shoot through the fake news”.
Trump’s visit to Reading on Monday could be key to his prospects in the state as he seeks to shore up support from Latino voters, particularly those of Puerto Rican heritage, amid an ongoing controversy over a speaker at a recent Trump rally who called the US territory a “floating island of garbage”.
Harris — whose campaign has sought to capitalise on Trump’s incendiary comments — will also make a campaign stop in Reading on Monday, visiting a local Puerto Rican restaurant with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman who is of Puerto Rican descent, and Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s popular Democratic governor.