East Lansing
\nKamala Harris courted voters angered by the Gaza war while Donald Trump doubled down on violent rhetoric with a comment about journalists being shot as the tense US election campaign entered its final hours.
\nThe Democratic vice president and the Republican former president frantically blitzed several swing states as they tried to win over the last holdouts with less than 36 hours left until polls open on Election Day on Tuesday. Trump predicted a \u201clandslide\u201d, while Harris told a raucous rally in must-win Michigan that \u201cwe have momentum — it\u2019s on our side.
\n\u201cThe 2024 race is going down to the wire, with more key states effectively tied at this point than in any comparable election. Over 77.6 million people have cast early votes, around half of the total ballots cast in 2020. With the clock ticking, Harris, 60, spent the day in Michigan where she risks losing the critical support of a 200,000-strong Arab-American community that has denounced US handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
\n\u201cAs president, I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza,\u201d Harris said at the start of her speech at Michigan State University, noting that there were leaders of the community present. But the rest of the speech was upbeat, with Harris spending more time on urging people to get out and vote than on attacks on Trump. \u201cWe got two days to get this done,\u201d she said. Earlier, Harris quoted scripture in a majority-Black church in Detroit, Michigan and urging Americans to look beyond Trump.
\n\u201cLet us turn the page and write the next chapter of our history,\u201d she said. Trump on Sunday zigzagged through Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia — the three biggest swing-state prizes in the Electoral College system that awards US states influence according to their population.
\nThe 78-year-old Trump, the oldest major party candidate in US history, added to his increasingly dark rhetoric by musing to supporters in Lititz, Pennsylvania, that he wouldn\u2019t mind if journalists were shot. Discussing his near-miss assassination attempt against him in July, he said to laughter that to be hit again \u201csomebody would have to shoot through the fake news — and I don\u2019t mind that so much.\u201d
\nTrump called Democrats \u201cdemonic\u201d and, despite no evidence of any meaningful election cheating so far, claimed that Democrats in Pennsylvania \u201care fighting so hard to steal this damn thing.\u201d Adding to fears that he would not accept a defeat in 2024, Trump added that he \u201cshouldn\u2019t have left\u201d the White House after he lost his 2020 reelection effort to Joe Biden.
\nTrump meanwhile said in Macon, Georgia, that he had asked vaccine-skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who dropped his own presidential bid to support Trump, to work on \u201cwomen\u2019s health\u201d and \u201cpesticides.\u201d His comments came a day after Kennedy caused consternation by saying that a Trump White House would order US water systems to remove fluoride from public water supplies.
\nLater in another rambling speech in Kinston, North Carolina Trump said \u201cwe\u2019re going to have on Tuesday a landslide that\u2019s too big to rig.\u201d The polls however show that the result is likely to be historically tight. A final New York Times\/Siena poll Sunday flagged incremental changes in swing states, but the results from all seven remained within the margin of error.
\nHarris got a boost Saturday as the final Des Moines Register poll for Iowa — seen as a highly credible test of wider public sentiment — showed a stunning turnaround, with Harris ahead in a state won easily by Trump in 2016 and 2020.
\nIn the last hours, both candidates are desperately trying to shore up their bases, and win over any undecided voters. Pollsters have noted an erosion in Black support for Harris. But with abortion rights a top voter concern, her campaign has hailed the large proportion of women turning out among early voters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
East Lansing Kamala Harris courted voters angered by the Gaza war while Donald Trump doubled down on violent rhetoric with a comment about journalists being shot as the tense US election campaign entered its final hours. The Democratic vice president and the Republican former president frantically blitzed several swing states as they tried to win […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":441599,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-441569","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n