Battle for The White House

Millions of U.S. voters are set to cast their ballots Tuesday as they decide whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump will be the country’s next leader.

Polls heading into Election Day indicated a tight race, particularly in a group of battleground states that will be key to deciding the winner.

Both candidates made stops Monday in Pennsylvania, one of those closely watched states, holding a series of rallies including nearby each another in the Pittsburgh area as they projected confidence in their own campaigns.

“Tomorrow is Election Day, and the momentum is on our side,” Harris told her supporters gathered at a historic steel facility that nodded to Pittsburgh’s history as the heart of the country’s steel industry. “Our campaign has tapped into the ambitions, the aspirations and the dreams of the American people. And we know it is time for a new generation of leadership in America.”

“We must finish strong,” Harris added. “Make no mistake, we will win.”

Trump, addressing his supporters at a sports arena, said another Trump administration would “launch the most extraordinary economic boom the world has ever seen.”

“If you vote for Kamala, you will have four more years of misery, failure and disaster,” Trump said. “Our country may never recover. Vote for me and I will deliver rising wages, soaring income, and a colossal surge of jobs, wealth and opportunity for America of every race, religion, color and creed. Every one of them.”

Ahead of Tuesday’s Election Day, more than 81 million Americans cast early votes, either in person at polling stations or by mail.

The total is more than half the 158 million who voted in the 2020 election, when President Joe Biden defeated Trump. It was a Democratic victory that to this day Trump says he was cheated out of by fraudulent voting rules and vote counts.

Dozens of court decisions, often rendered by Trump-appointed judges, went against him as he attempted to challenge the 2020 results. But Sunday, he told a Pennsylvania rally he “shouldn’t have left” the White House in 2021 when Biden assumed office.

Trump has said he will only accept Tuesday’s outcome if he concludes that the election is conducted fairly, which Democratic critics have said they assume means only if he wins. Both Trump and Harris have assembled vast teams of lawyers to contest voting and vote-counting issues as they materialize Tuesday during the day, into the evening and the following days, until a clear winner emerges.

A Trump victory would make him only the second president to serve two non-consecutive terms, after Grover Cleveland in the 1880s. He would also be the first felon to serve as president as he awaits sentencing later in November after being convicted of 34 charges linked to his hush money payment to a porn film star ahead of his successful 2016 run for the presidency.

Trump has often punctuated his campaign with angry broadsides at his Democratic opponents, calling them the “enemy within” the country and a threat to the country’s future. He has belittled Harris as a person of limited intellect and said she would be the pawn of other world leaders in dealing with international relationships.

Harris for weeks has claimed she is the underdog in the campaign but lately expressed more optimism and now says she expects to become the country’s 47th president. If elected, she would be the first woman to be the American leader, its first of South Asian descent and its second Black president after Barack Obama.

She has described Trump as an “unserious man,” saying he would be a threat to American democracy and unhinged by any normal presidential constraints after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that presidents cannot be prosecuted for any wrongdoing linked to their official actions.

Pollsters say the country’s voters are deeply divided between the two candidates. It is an assessment reflected in how major media outlets look at the possible outcome just ahead of the official Election Day.

Last-minute polling shows the Harris-Trump race all but tied in the battleground states, within the margin of statistical error.

ABC News polling shows Trump winning five of the seven battleground states, but The Washington Post says its aggregation of polls has Harris ahead in four. The New York Times says Trump is ahead in four, Harris two, and the race tied in Pennsylvania.

The importance of battleground states cannot be overstated.

U.S. presidential elections are not decided by the national popular vote but through the Electoral College, which turns the election into 50 state-by-state contests, with 48 of the states awarding all their electoral votes to the winner in those states. 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. Pennsylvania alone has 19 electoral votes.

Polls show either Harris or Trump with substantial or 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, the winner will be decided in the seven remaining battleground states, where both Harris and Trump have staged frequent rallies, all but ignoring the rest of the country for campaign stops.

Some information for this story was provided by The Associated Press and Reuters