U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are making a final push to secure votes with a week left before election day.
Harris, the Democratic Party candidate, delivered her so-called “closing argument” in a Tuesday evening speech near the White House, while Trump held a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, one of the seven political battleground states likely to be key in determining the winner in the tightly contested race.
Harris pledged to work to improve people’s lives and would show up to work at the White House with a to-do list, while saying Trump is focused only on himself and would begin a new term with an enemies list.
Her speech was located in the same area where in January 2021 Trump addressed his supporters shortly before a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to interrupt the certification of Trump’s election loss to President Joe Biden.
“Look, we know who Donald Trump is. He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election,” Harris said.
Polls show the contest in a virtual dead heat, with Harris and Trump tied in some crucial states or only narrowly ahead or behind, all within the statistical margin of error.
Nearly 49 million people have already cast votes, either at polling stations or by mail, ahead of next Tuesday’s official Election Day, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. More than 155 million voted in the 2020 election.
Before heading to Allentown, Pennsylvania, a city with a Latino-majority population, Trump spoke Tuesday at his oceanside Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. He described Harris as “grossly incompetent … a total trainwreck.”
But Trump took no questions from reporters and did not mention comic Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke at a Trump rally Sunday at New York’s Madison Square Garden, claiming the Hispanic U.S. territory of Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage.”
Trump’s campaign has distanced itself from the joke. Trump has not publicly commented about the remarks but told ABC News he does not know Hinchcliffe, saying, “Someone put him up there. I don't know who he is.”
Trump also maintained he didn't hear the joke, even as it has been played on television and written about extensively. When asked what he made of the joke, he did not take the opportunity to denounce it, repeating that he didn't hear it.
He called the New York rally “an absolute lovefest.”
Puerto Ricans living on the island are Americans but cannot vote in the election because only people living in U.S. states, not territories, can vote in presidential elections. But hundreds of thousands of people who grew up on the island have moved to the U.S. mainland, as have their relatives, and they can vote in whatever state they live in.
With hundreds of thousands of Puerto Rican votes critical to the outcome in some of the battleground states, the Harris campaign quickly produced a digital ad saying Latino voters “deserve better” than what the former president represents.
Pennsylvania alone, which both candidates see as crucial to winning the presidency, is home to more than 300,000 eligible Puerto Rican voters, according to the Latino Data Hub at the University of California Los Angeles.
There are also sizable Puerto Rican populations in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan, three other battleground states.
On the campaign trail, Harris and Trump have traded frequent insults.
Trump has described Harris as someone with a low IQ and said she would be like “a play toy” for other world leaders. “They’re going to walk all over her,” he has said.
Some of Trump’s former top aides from his 2017-2021 term in the White House described him as a fascist with the intent to govern in a second term as an authoritarian. Harris said she agreed with the characterization.
Trump returned the taunt to describe Harris the same way.
More than 1,500 protesters were arrested for their roles in January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, where 140 law enforcement personnel were injured. The demonstrators caused $2.9 million in property damage to the Capitol as they smashed windows and doors and rampaged through congressional offices.
More than 1,000 rioters have been convicted of an array of offenses, with some of the most serious offenders sentenced to years of imprisonment.
Trump says if he wins the election, he might pardon them.
U.S. presidential elections are not decided by the national popular vote but rather through the Electoral College vote, which turns the election into 50 state-by-state contests, with 48 of the 50 states awarding all their electoral votes to the winner in their states, either Harris or Trump. Nebraska and Maine allocate theirs by both statewide and congressional district vote counts.
The number of electoral votes in each state is based on population, so the biggest states hold the most sway in determining the overall national outcome, with the winner needing 270 of the 538 electoral votes to claim the presidency.
Polls show either Harris or Trump holds substantial or somewhat comfortable leads in 43 of the states, enough for each to get to 200 electoral votes or more. Barring an upset in one of those states, that leaves the outcome to the remaining seven states – a northern tier of three states (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), two states in the Southeast (Georgia and North Carolina) and two in the Southwest (Arizona and Nevada).
Polling in the seven states is easily within the margins of statistical error, leaving the outcome in doubt in all seven.
Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press and Reuters
