Kamala Harris stakes closing election pitch on joy, warnings and women voters

With only days to go until the election, Kamala Harris made a closing pitch to voters that sought to balance joyful optimism with dire warnings about the threat posed by her Republican opponent.

“We have an opportunity in this election to finally turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump, who spends full time trying to keep us divided and afraid of each other,” the Democratic vice-president told an estimated crowd of 12,000 at a park in downtown Atlanta on Saturday.

It is a message Harris has hammered home in the final stretch of a presidential campaign powered by surging support from women and younger voters that would have seemed improbable at the start of the year.

But Harris now has an even chance of becoming America’s first female president after a frenetic four months that started with a disastrous debate performance from Joe Biden that led him to step aside in favour of his vice-president.

What followed was a mad-dash autumn of campaigning in which Harris has erased Trump’s polling lead and surpassed his fundraising advantage.

The Financial Times poll tracker now shows Harris leading the former Republican president nationally by just over one point.

Critically, the candidates are in a statistical tie in the seven swing states that are likely to determine the election. That has led many analysts to conclude the next US president could be decided by a few thousand voters in just a handful of states. Four years ago, Biden won Georgia’s 16 electoral college votes by a razor-thin margin of less than 12,000 votes.

Harris and her advisers insist they have the momentum heading into polling day and that undecided voters making their choice in the final days were breaking their way.

“Every single one of our battleground states are absolutely in play,” said a senior Harris campaign official. “We continue to see multiple pathways to 270,” the official added, referring to the number of electoral college votes needed to win the White House.

Harris has criss-crossed the country in the final days of her campaign, hitting every swing state at least once.

On Thursday and Friday, Harris whipped through Nevada, Arizona and Wisconsin. On Saturday, she flew straight from Georgia to North Carolina. On Sunday, she is expected to run through Michigan before rounding out her last day of campaigning on Monday with three major rallies in Pennsylvania.

“We still have work to do,” Harris told the crowd in Atlanta. “But here’s the thing, we like hard work . . . and make no mistake, we will win.”

The Harris campaign has for weeks sought to craft a message that paints an optimistic vision of America’s future and warns of what they see as the threat Trump — who is already casting doubt on the results of next week’s election — poses to US democracy.

Harris has made overtures to female voters by vowing to restore abortion access and protect reproductive freedoms that were stripped away after Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices helped overturn Roe vs Wade in 2022. She has extended an olive branch to centrist Republicans who are disillusioned with Trump, insisting she would put “country over party” as president.

Top Harris advisers maintain the strategy is working, in part because Trump has spent the final days of his own campaign wrestling with a backlash to racist and misogynistic remarks from speakers at his Madison Square Garden rally. He has courted controversy with a series of vulgar and incendiary comments, including musing over how anti-Trump former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney would react if she had “guns trained on her face” and “nine barrels shooting at her”.

By contrast, the mood at Harris rallies has been relentlessly upbeat, with live music and celebrity appearances serving as warm-up acts. At the campaign stop in Atlanta on Saturday, throngs of voters — including many women who showed up with their young children in tow — coloured home-made signs and assembled friendship bracelets to show their support for Harris.

On Saturday night, she made an unscheduled stop in the Democratic stronghold of New York City for an appearance on Saturday Night Live.

“We are so ready for a fresh change,” said Phyllis Hernandez, a 63-year-old Atlanta voter. “We are not going to be taken back into the dark ages. We are moving forward with hope and joy.”

A senior Harris campaign official said their private polling showed Trump’s antics were undercutting his own support.

“We are winning battleground voters who have made up their minds in the last week, and we are winning them by double-digit margins,” the official said.

“We have believed all along that there were still undecided voters here, and that the close of this race was really, really important, and we are seeing that to be the case.”

Harris aides were also buoyed by Gallup polling out this week showing Democrats had a 10-point advantage over Republicans when it came to energy, with 77 per cent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents saying they were more enthusiastic about voting this year than in previous years, compared with 67 per cent of Republicans.

If Harris wins on Tuesday, it could well be because of women. Her campaign cites data showing more women have submitted their ballots by mail or in-person ahead of election day than men. Polls have consistently shown women overwhelmingly back Harris, while a similar percentage of men support Trump.

Still, many presidential campaign veterans caution that opinion polling and early voting figures in the final days of such a tight race are not necessarily predictive.

“We are all in a dark tunnel. That is the reality,” said Bob Shrum, a longtime Democratic consultant who worked on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign and John Kerry’s 2004 bid for the White House. “But there are some emerging signs that she is doing very well.”

The Harris team maintains that their hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending on targeted advertising and a robust “ground game” — the vast network of campaign volunteers and party organisers across the country — will help them turn out enough voters on Tuesday to push Harris over the line.

The senior Harris official said the campaign had knocked on more than 13mn doors across the seven battleground states to date. The Gallup poll found 42 per cent of registered voters nationwide said they had been contacted by Harris’s campaign, compared with 35 per cent who said they had heard from the Trump team.

“She has done the work. She has laid out what people need to hear,” said Brandi Wyche, chair of the local Democratic party in DeKalb County, just outside of Atlanta, who has worked for months to rally support for Harris. “Now it is just about making sure to get people to the polls to elect her as our next president.”

Additional reporting by James Politi and Steff Chávez in Washington