WASHINGTON – Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump made their final pitches to voters Monday in the same parts of Pennsylvania at roughly the same time, focusing on the state that could make or break their chances during the last full day of the presidential campaign.
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.
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“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 Apprentice,” the 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.
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.”
With 19 Electoral College votes, the state is the biggest prize of any battleground. A Trump victory there would puncture the Democrats' “blue wall” and make it harder for Harris to win the necessary 270 votes.
“If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole ball of wax,” Trump said during an event in Reading, in the state's southeast corner.
Both candidates visited the area, which 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.”
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.
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 U.S. 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 only the second president in history to win nonconsecutive 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.
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.”
Harris also offered some insights into her personal formation as a politician that she doesn't often divulge. In Scranton, she 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,” the vice president 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, Harris rallied with rapper Fat Joe. She then made her own visit to Reading after Trump's rally had concluded, visiting Old San Juan Cafe, a Puerto Rican restaurant, with Ocasio-Cortez. Both Fat Joe, whose real name is Joseph Cartagena, and Ocasio-Cortez are of Puerto Rican heritage.
Supporters chanted “Sí se puede” and “Kamala” as the vice president’s motorcade pulled up. Once inside, Harris chatted with some diners, even mixing in “Gracias” and a few Spanish words. The vice president later ordered cassava, yellow rice and pork, saying, “I'm very hungry" as she noted that she's been too busy campaigning to find time for many meals.
Harris did some of her own canvassing afterward, stopping at two homes in Reading while flanked by campaign volunteers.
“It’s the day before the election and I just wanted to come by and say I hope to earn your vote," she said at one house.
The woman replied, “You already got my vote" and said her husband would be casting his ballot the next day.
Standing in line for Harris’ Allentown rally, 54-year-old Ron Kessler, an Air Force veteran and Republican-turned-Democrat, said he planned 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.”
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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.