ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump made their closing pitches to voters Monday in the identical a part of Pennsylvania at roughly the identical time, spending the final full day of the presidential marketing campaign in a state that would make or break their possibilities.
Specializing in Pennsylvania’s southeast nook, Trump took the stage in Studying, about 30 miles from Allentown, the place Harris held her personal occasion about half an hour later.
“If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole ball of wax,” Trump mentioned. “It’s over.”
Certainly, a Trump victory in Pennsylvania, flipping its 19 Electoral Faculty votes, would puncture the Democrats’ “blue wall” and make it more durable for Harris to win the mandatory 270 votes.
Harris, the Democratic nominee, spent all of Monday in Pennsylvania, the most important prize among the many states anticipated to find out the Electoral Faculty end result, and provided a equally blunt evaluation.
“We need everyone in Pennsylvania to vote,” she mentioned. “You are going to make the difference in this election.”
Along with Allentown, Harris visited Scranton — the birthplace of President Joe Biden — and Studying and had a cease deliberate in Pittsburgh earlier than ending with a late-night Philadelphia rally that was to incorporate Woman Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.
“Are you ready to do this?” Harris yelled Monday in Scranton, with a big handmade “VOTE FOR FREEDOM” signal behind her and an analogous “VOTE” banner to her facet.
Trump went first to North Carolina earlier than visiting Studying. He then headed to Pittsburgh, on the reverse finish of the state, earlier than concluding in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the place he’ll maintain his final marketing campaign rally in the identical place he concluded his 2016 and 2020 runs.
Southeast Pennsylvania is dwelling to hundreds of Latinos, together with a large Puerto Rican inhabitants. Harris and her allies have repeatedly hit Trump for a comic’s dig at Puerto Rico in the course of the former president’s marquee Madison Sq. Backyard occasion. The comic, Tony Hinchcliffe, referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
“It was absurd,” mentioned German Vega, a Dominican American who lives in Studying and have become 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.”
However Emilio Feliciano, 43, waited exterior Studying’s Santander Area for an opportunity to take a photograph of Trump’s motorcade. He dismissed the feedback about Puerto Rico regardless of his household being Puerto Rican, saying he cares concerning the financial system and that’s why he’ll vote for Trump.
“Is the border going to be safe? Are you going to keep crime down? That’s what I care about,” he mentioned.
Harris advised the gang, “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 mentioned, including that “momentum is on our side. Can you feel it?”
Trump, in the meantime, caught to speaking about his proposed crackdown on immigration. He known as to the stage Patty Morin, the mom of 37-year-old Rachel Morin, who was discovered lifeless a day after she went lacking throughout a visit to go mountain climbing. Officers say the suspect in her loss of life, Victor Antonio Martinez Hernandez, entered the U.S. illegally after allegedly killing a lady in his dwelling nation of El Salvador.
About 77 million Individuals have voted early. A victory by both facet can be unprecedented.
Trump profitable would make him the primary incoming president to have been indicted and convicted of a felony, after his hush-money trial in New York. He’ll achieve the ability to finish different federal investigations pending in opposition to him. Trump would additionally change into solely the second president in historical past to win nonconsecutive White Home phrases, after Grover Cleveland within the late nineteenth century.
Harris is vying to change into the primary lady, first Black lady and first individual of South Asian descent to succeed in the Oval Workplace — 4 years after she broke the identical boundaries in nationwide workplace by changing into President Joe Biden’s second in command.
The vp ascended to the highest of the Democratic ticket after Biden’s disastrous efficiency in a June debate set into movement his withdrawal from the race — considered one of a sequence of convulsions that hit this 12 months’s marketing campaign.
Trump survived by millimeters an assassination try at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. His Secret Service element foiled a second try in September, when a gunman had arrange a rifle as Trump golfed at considered one of his programs in Florida.
Harris, 60, has pitched herself as a generational change from 81-year-old Biden and Trump, who’s 78. She’s emphasised her help for abortion rights after the 2022 Supreme Courtroom choice that ended the constitutional proper to abortion companies, and she or he has recurrently famous the previous president’s position within the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Assembling a coalition starting from progressives akin to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney, Harris has known as Trump a menace to democracy and late within the marketing campaign even embraced the critique that Trump is precisely described as a “ fascist.”
Heading into Monday, Harris has largely stopped mentioning Trump by identify, calling him as a substitute “the other guy.” She is promising to resolve issues and search consensus.
Harris marketing campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon mentioned on a name with reporters that not saying Trump’s identify was deliberate as a result of voters “want to see in their leader an optimistic, hopeful, patriotic vision for the future.”
Harris additionally provided some insights into her private formation as a politician that she doesn’t typically reveal. In Scranton, she talked about as soon as being a longshot whereas operating for San Francisco district legal professional in 2002 and the way 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 vp mentioned, recalling how she would tape her posters to the surface of the board, fill the highest with flyers and “require people to talk to me as they walked in and out.”
In Allentown, Harris rallied with rapper Fats Joe. She then made her personal go to to Studying after Trump’s rally had concluded, visiting Outdated San Juan Cafe, a Puerto Rican restaurant, with Ocasio-Cortez. Each Fats Joe, whose actual identify is Joseph Cartagena, and Ocasio-Cortez are of Puerto Rican heritage.
Supporters chanted “Sí se puede” and “Kamala” because the vp’s motorcade pulled up. As soon as inside, Harris chatted with some diners, even mixing in “Gracias” and some Spanish phrases. The vp later ordered cassava, yellow rice and pork, saying, “I’m very hungry” as she famous that she’s been too busy campaigning to make time for many meals.
Afterward, Harris did a few of her personal canvassing, stopping at two houses in Studying whereas flanked by marketing 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 mentioned at one home.
The lady replied, “You already got my vote” and mentioned her husband can be casting his poll the following day.
Standing in line for Harris’ Allentown rally, 54-year-old Ron Kessler, an Air Pressure veteran and Republican-turned-Democrat, mentioned he deliberate to vote for simply the second time in his life. Kessler mentioned that, for a very long time, he didn’t vote, pondering the nation “would vote for the correct candidate.”
However “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.”
As not too long ago as Sunday, Trump renewed his false claims that U.S. elections are rigged in opposition to him, mused about violence in opposition to journalists and mentioned he “ shouldn’t have left” the White Home in 2021 — darkish turns which have overshadowed one other anchor of his closing argument: “Kamala broke it. I will fix it.”
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Superville reported from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Barrow reported from Washington. Related Press writers Makiya Seminera in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Zeke Miller, Will Weissert and Michelle L. Value in Washington contributed to this report.
