Trump offers darkness, Harris offers optimism ahead of American elections

CNN
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The tumultuous 2024 election ends in a contrast that reflects America’s fateful choices on the eve of the election.

Former President Donald Trump is darkening what is already the most dystopian closing argument in modern American history and making new and unsubstantiated claims that Democrats are cheating.

Vice President Kamala Harris, warning of the dangers of a second Trump term, claims to build momentum and spark optimism and aspiration by declaring “a new generation of leadership in America.”

Voters – more than 75 million of whom have already cast ballots – are finally facing an election that could profoundly change the country and the world and leave people on both sides fearing for their way of life if their candidate loses. .

Nervous tensions reach boiling point as Trump and Harris race through swing states that are likely to be decisive in a race marked by extraordinary twists and turns that nevertheless end with them neck-and-neck in the polls .

The former president will begin his term on Monday in North Carolina – a state that Republicans have long been expected to close – before heading to Pennsylvania, where the winner could ultimately be decided. He will end his third presidential campaign with an overnight rally in Michigan. Harris, who held her last rally in Michigan on Sunday, will spend Monday in another vital blue wall state, Pennsylvania, including a big finish in Philadelphia with Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.

Trump is becoming more radical by the hour in his outbursts, which seem to herald a new attempt to defy the will of voters if he loses. For example, on Sunday in Pennsylvania, he falsely claimed that Democrats were “fighting so hard to steal the damn thing” and that voting machines would be hacked, while claiming he should not have left the White House in 2021.

Harris is trying to recapture the sense of joy and possibility that filled her early campaign rallies. On Sunday at a black church in Detroit, she condemned those who “spread hate, spread fear and spread chaos,” referring to her rival. “We will be tested in the next two days,” she said. “We were born for this time.”

But the vice president also sought to call upon America’s better nature angels, striking an uplifting note that her Republican foe had long abandoned. Harris said Saturday in North Carolina: “I have fulfilled America’s promise. And today I see the promise of America in everyone who is here. In all of you, in all of us. We are America’s promise.”

If Trump wins on Tuesday, he will become only the second defeated president to win non-consecutive terms. He will make one of the most stunning political comebacks in history after trying to set fire to democracy to stay in power after the 2020 election while being convicted of a crime and escaping two attempts on his life this year.

Harris could break a nearly 250-year line of male commanders in chief and become the first female president. It would be a stunning achievement after she unified a demoralized Democratic Party in July when President Joe Biden’s re-election bid was devastated by the ravages of age.

On the final day of the campaign, the stakes of the election are raised by the feeling that no one can say who will win.

Polls nationally and in vital swing states show no clear frontrunner, reflecting a country that is as polarized as it was when the race began. But it remains possible that one candidate has managed to gain late gains in battlegrounds including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona and could pull off a wider-than-expected victory.

Democrats are encouraged by apparent strong early turnout among women voters, and abortion rights could be a key issue in the first presidential election since Trump’s Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Harris has also worked to heal cracks in the traditional Democratic coalition as it tries to appeal to black men and Latino voters in particular.

Trump is banking on voters tired of high food and housing prices and still feeling the trauma of now-cooling inflation, and he is demonizing undocumented migrants to highlight the crisis at the southern border. The Biden administration has struggled for months to acknowledge the severity of each problem and offer effective remedies, meaning the seeds of Harris’ eventual defeat may have been sown long ago. And Trump’s team is convinced he will eat away at traditional minority Democratic constituencies and once again turn out people who don’t typically vote.

But there are also forebodings on Trump’s part. His behavior already looks like a new attempt to try to overturn the election results if he loses after his behavior after the last election led to the invasion of the US Capitol by supporters who beat police and tried to stop the certification of Biden’s victory. Harris has said she is prepared to respond if the former president makes a premature declaration of victory, and his maneuvers suggest that, absent a clear victory for either side, election uncertainty could last for days.

This is no ordinary election, thanks in large part to the smoldering presence of Trump, already the most destructive president of the modern era, who promises unlimited strongman rule if he retakes the Oval Office. If he makes good on his own promises, the twice-impeached GOP nominee will subject America’s governing, judicial and constitutional institutions to the greatest test in generations, in a time frame he promises to be rooted in personal vengeance.

Trump has laid out the darkest and most authoritarian platform of any presidential candidate in modern memory. He proposes the largest mass deportation of migrants in history, an operation that by definition would require law enforcement and perhaps even military involvement in a domestic crackdown that would threaten civil liberties. He openly considered using the US military against his political opponents, whom he called “enemies within” and parasites, aping the language of some of history’s worst tyrants.

The ex-president is also proposing to transform the economy on behalf of working Americans who have bought into his populist, nationalist message after seeing their livelihoods devastated by decades of globalization. But his love of tariffs risks causing a backlash that could set the economy back. Trump is also planning a purge of Washington bureaucrats and the destruction of agencies like the Justice Department that constrained him in his first term and which he wants to weaponize to overturn his criminal prosecutions and satisfy his personal and political whims.

More than nine years after Trump first entered the presidential race, he may be as strong politically as ever. He has crushed dissent within the Republican Party and strengthened his unwavering bond with tens of millions of Americans who believe he speaks for them and confounds elites they believe despise them.

Still, Harris approaches Election Day with a chance to end the Trump era and hand a second straight election defeat to a Republican Party that has appeased his lies and threats to the Constitution in a brutal bid for power.

It offers voters a chance to avoid the unrest and threats to the rule of law that Trump’s own campaign suggests he poses. The vice president also proposes reforms to improve the lives of working Americans, but her reforms are less revolutionary than Trump’s. She promises to make housing more affordable, fight what she calls price gouging by supermarket giants and guarantee better health care at more reasonable prices.

Harris took a risk by offering continuity at a time of deep dissatisfaction with domestic economic and political realities and growing national concern about a world in which tyrants are on the march. She has also struggled to separate herself from the 81-year-old president, who is deeply unpopular despite presiding over the industrialized world’s most robust economic recovery since the Covid-19 pandemic.

The campaign, which came to life on a wave of joy, ends with the starkest warnings yet that Trump is a fascist who could destroy America’s democratic way of life, alienate US allies and subjugate the country’s vital national image by kneeling before autocrats in Russia and China, to which he , obviously wants to imitate.

Harris’ best path to the presidency runs through the Democratic blue wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The CNN Poll of Polls, averaging the results of the last five nonpartisan polls, found no clear lead in any of the three states, although CNN/SSRS polls last week showed a narrow lead for Harris in the first two of those states and a tie in the Keystone State. If she loses Pennsylvania, Harris will need a combination of other swing states, including Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, where polling averages also show no clear lead. If Trump wins Pennsylvania — as he did in 2016 — he could take a huge step toward a second term.

The vice president’s campaign says she is gaining late momentum in the race. “From experience, it helps to end a presidential campaign with late-deciding voters trailing you by double digits and remaining undecided voters looking friendlier to you than to your opponent,” David Plouffe, an adviser to Harris, wrote on X on Friday .

Democrats saw a new surge of optimism Saturday when the latest campaign poll from the Des Moines Register and Mediacom showed Harris at 47% and Trump at 44% among likely voters in a state he won easily in 2020 and 2016. This difference is falling. the sampling margin of error is 3.4 points, suggesting there is no clear leader in the state. But the results, which suggested a shift toward Harris since the previous Iowa poll in September, also showed the vice president with a strong lead among women. If this situation were to repeat itself across the country, the vice president could be on track to win if she manages to limit her deficits relative to Trump, especially among white men.

The Trump campaign sent out scathing memos criticizing the Iowa polls and a number of New York Times and Siena College polls. And the former president immediately used the new data to flesh out his claim that he was the victim of a fraudulent election. “We’ve been waiting nine years for this, and we’ve got two days now, and we’ve got all this crap going on with the press and fake stories and fake polls,” he said in Pennsylvania.

But with just hours left until Election Day, none of the polls matter anymore. Americans are about to make their choice.