Trump offers darkness, Harris offers optimism on election eve in America

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

(CNN) — The tumultuous 2024 election is ending with a contrast that encapsulates America’s fateful choice on election eve.

Ex-President Donald Trump is darkening what is already the most dystopian closing argument in modern American history and flinging new and baseless claims that Democrats are cheating.

Vice President Kamala Harris, while warning about the perils of a Trump second term, is claiming momentum and invoking optimism and aspiration as she lays claim to a “new generation of leadership in America.”

Voters — more than 75 million of whom have already cast their ballots — are finally face-to-face with an election that could profoundly change the country and the world and that has people on both sides fearing for their way of life should their candidate lose.

Nervous tensions are coming to a boil as Trump and Harris dash through the swing states that are likely to decide a race marked by extraordinary twists that nevertheless ends with them neck-and-neck in the polls.

The former president will start Monday in North Carolina — a state Republicans expected to lock down long ago — before heading to Pennsylvania, which could end up deciding who wins. He’ll close his third presidential bid with a late-night rally in Michigan. Harris, who held her final Michigan rally 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 getting more extreme by the hour in outbursts that seem to augur a fresh attempt to defy the will of voters if he loses. For instance, he claimed falsely in Pennsylvania on Sunday that Democrats are “fighting so hard to steal this damn thing” and that voting machines would be tampered with, while saying he shouldn’t have left the White House in 2021.

Harris is trying to reanimate the feeling of joy and possibility that infused her early campaign rallies. On Sunday at a Black church in Detroit, she condemned those who “sow hate, spread fear and spread chaos” in a reference to her rival. “In these next two days we will be tested,” she said. “We were born for such a time as this.”

But the vice president also sought to summon the best angels of America’s nature, striking aspirational notes that her Republican foe abandoned long ago. Harris said in North Carolina on Saturday, “I have lived the promise of America. And today, I see the promise of America in everybody who is here. In all of you, in all of us. We are the promise of America.”

History is beckoning

If Trump wins on Tuesday, he will be only the second defeated president to win a nonconsecutive term. He will complete one of the most staggering political comebacks ever after trying to torch democracy to stay in power after the 2020 election, being convicted of a crime and escaping two attempts on his life this year.

Harris could shatter the line of nearly 250 years of male commanders in chief and become the first female president. It would be a stunning feat after she unified the demoralized Democratic Party in July when President Joe Biden’s reelection bid was destroyed by the ravages of age.

On the last day of the campaign, the massive stakes of the election are heightened by the sense that no one can possibly say who will win.

Polls nationally and in the vital swing states show no clear leader, reflecting a country that is polarized just as sharply as when the race started. But the possibility remains that one candidate has managed to fashion a late advantage in battlegrounds including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona, and could sweep to a wider-than-anticipated win.

Democrats are encouraged by apparently strong early turnout among women voters, with abortion rights a potentially pivotal issue in the first presidential election since the Trump-built Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Harris has also worked to repair fissures in the traditional Democratic coalition, trying to appeal to Black men and Latino voters in particular.

Trump is banking on voters weary of high food and housing prices and still feeling the trauma from now-cooled inflation, and he has demonized undocumented migrants to highlight a southern border crisis. The Biden administration struggled for months to recognize the gravity of each issue and to offer effective remedies, meaning the seeds of a possible Harris defeat may have long been sown. And Trump’s team is convinced he will eat into traditional minority Democratic constituencies and again bring out people who don’t typically vote.

But there are also foreboding signs from Trump. His behavior already looks like a new attempt to try to overturn the result if he loses after his conduct following the last election led to an invasion of the US Capitol by supporters who beat up police and tried to thwart the certification of Biden’s victory. Harris has said that she’s ready to respond if the ex-president makes a premature victory declaration, and his maneuverings suggest that, absent a clear victory by either side, uncertainty over the election could last days.

The end of Trumpism — or the start of an extreme new era?

This is no ordinary election, due largely to the smoldering presence of Trump, already the most disruptive president of the modern age, who is vowing unfettered strongman rule if he wins back the Oval Office. If he follows through on his own promises, the twice-impeached Republican nominee would subject America’s governing, judicial and constitutional institutions to their greatest test in generations in a term he is pledging to root in personal vengeance.

Trump has outlined the darkest, most authoritarian platform of any presidential candidate in modern memory. He is proposing the biggest-ever mass deportation of migrants — an operation that by definition would involve law enforcement and possibly even the military in a domestic crackdown that would challenge civil liberties. He has openly considered using US armed forces against his political opponents whom he labeled “enemies from within” and vermin, emulating the language of some of history’s most notorious tyrants.

The ex-president also proposes a transformation of the economy in the name of working Americans who have flocked to his populist, nationalist message after seeing their livelihoods hollowed out by decades of globalization. But his love of tariffs risks causing a backlash that could throw the economy into reverse. Trump also plans a purge of Washington bureaucrats and gutting of agencies like the Justice Department that constrained him in his first term and that he wants to weaponize to expunge his criminal prosecutions and fulfill his personal and political whims.

More than nine years after first entering the presidential fray, Trump may be as strong politically as he has ever been. He’s crushed dissent inside the GOP and cemented his unshakable bond with tens of millions of Americans who believe he speaks for them and confounds elites who they believe disdain them.

Yet Harris heads into Election Day with a chance to end the Trump era and hand a second straight electoral defeat to a Republican Party that appeased his lies and threats to the Constitution in the hardline pursuit of power.

She is offering voters the chance to dodge the tumult and peril to the rule of law that Trump’s own campaign suggests he represents. The vice president also proposes reforms to improve the lives of working Americans — but hers are less revolutionary than Trump’s. She’s promising steps to make housing more affordable, to crack down on what she calls price gouging by supermarket giants and to guarantee better health care at more reasonable prices.

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

A campaign that exploded to life in a surge of joy is ending with the most searing warnings 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 as he genuflects to autocrats in Russia and China whom he apparently wishes to emulate.

The route to 270

Harris’ best route to the presidency runs through the Democratic blue wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. CNN’s Poll of Polls, averaging the last five nonpartisan surveys, shows no clear leader in any of the trio, though CNN/SSRS surveys last week indicated a narrow edge for Harris in the first two of those states and a tie in the Keystone State. If she loses Pennsylvania, Harris would need a combination of other swing states, including Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, where poll averages also show no clear leader. If Trump wins Pennsylvania — as he did in 2016 — he could take a huge step toward a second term.

The vice president’s campaign has claimed that she’s generating late momentum in the race. “It’s helpful, from experience, to be closing a presidential campaign with late-deciding voters breaking by double digits to you and the remaining undecideds looking more friendly to you than your opponent,” David Plouffe, a Harris adviser, wrote on X on Friday.

Democrats experienced a new surge of optimism on Saturday when the last poll of the campaign 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. That margin falls within the poll’s 3.4-point margin of sampling error and suggests no clear leader in the state. But the findings, which suggested a shift toward Harris from the previous Iowa Poll in September, also showed the vice president with a strong advantage among women. If such a pattern is repeated nationwide, the vice president could be headed to victory if she can limit her deficit to Trump among White males especially.

Trump’s campaign sent out acerbic memos assailing the Iowa Poll and a set of New York Times/Siena College surveys. And the ex-president immediately used the new data to flesh out his claim that he’s a victim of a rigged election. “We’ve been waiting nine years for this, and we’ve got two days, and we got all this crap going on with the press and with fake stuff and fake polls,” he said in Pennsylvania.

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

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