After months of enduring a deluge of punditry, polling and ad pitches, voters finally get their say.
Millions of Americans across the country are poised to pour into the polls, where they will choose Tuesday whether to send Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump to the Oval Office.
A bruising campaign exposed deep ideological divisions between the two parties and a yawning gender gap between Harris and Trump, with women supporting Harris by a 16-percentage-point margin and men backing Trump by 18 points, according to the latest NBC News poll.
Already, more than 77.3 million people have cast mail-in and early in-person ballots, according to an NBC News analysis.
But both candidates believe their fates rest with seven battleground states that will ultimately decide the contest. Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina ended up consuming the campaign’s most precious resources: time and money. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of ads blanketed the airwaves in the battlegrounds as Harris and Trump held large-scale, competing rallies.
On Tuesday, Trump plans to vote in person in his home state, Florida, alongside his wife, Melania. Then, he is to host members and top donors for dinner at Mar-a-Lago, where he will spend the evening. Once there is a sense of the results, Trump will head to the Palm Beach County Convention Center.
Meanwhile, Harris, who closed Monday night with a final rally at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the steps made famous in the “Rocky” movies, is back in Washington. She has already voted early by mail in California. On Tuesday night after voting closes, she is set to return to her alma mater, Howard University in Washington.
On the eve of the election, Harris and Trump raced to those swing states making their final pitches, each focusing heavily on Pennsylvania, the biggest electoral prize of those states.
Harris, who could become the first female president, campaigned on restoring abortion rights and protecting democracy, all the while promising to back a “care economy” that aided first-time homeowners, small businesses and the elderly.
Trump often used dark — and sometimes violent — rhetoric, vowing to reset the economy and deport millions of immigrants.
Both campaigns projected confidence Monday.
“Momentum is on our side. Can you feel it? We have momentum, right? Because our campaign has tapped into the ambitions and the aspirations and the dreams of the American people,” Harris said in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “We are optimistic and excited about what we will do together, and we here know it is time for a new generation of leadership in America.”
Trump made similar proclamations at a rally in North Carolina.
“Hopefully everything will work out well; we’re way leading. All we have to do is close, we have to close it,” he said. “I hate the expression, actually, but it’s ours to lose. Does that make sense to you? It’s ours to lose. If we, if we get everybody out and vote, there’s not a thing they can do. And if we don’t, and if we don’t, they have to get every person that ever signed anything in that horrendously dangerous party that’s going to destroy our country, and it already is destroying our country.”
The final day of voting caps a wild and at times jarring 15 weeks, after President Joe Biden stepped aside from seeking the Democratic nomination and threw his support behind Harris. Meanwhile, Trump endured two assassination attempts, including one in which he was grazed by a bullet.
Democrats embraced Harris’ entrance into the race, setting fundraising records and volunteering and registering to vote in droves. Trump clinched the Republican nomination, even as he now has a criminal conviction and faces additional felony counts.
Forecasters have for weeks predicted a deadlocked contest that has been within polls’ margins of error. The Harris campaign, flush with money, has deployed a massive ground game in the battleground states that aims to deliver its voters to the polls. Republicans have fretted about their own ground operation after Trump outsourced canvassing efforts to third parties, about which multiple reports have documented turmoil.
Harris campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a briefing with reporters Monday that the campaign saw multiple pathways to reach the 270 necessary electoral votes, including the “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, as well as in Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia. Biden won all of those states in 2020, except North Carolina.
“I would say that in Georgia, we like what we’re seeing. We see that we are on pace to win a very close race here. And in fact, as we’ve been looking day in and day out as we got closer to the deadline, we saw that in Georgia, in particular, the early vote numbers each day got younger and got more diverse,” O’Malley Dillon said. “We saw African American voters taking up a greater amount of the overall share of the vote, and we are seeing pretty high numbers overall, of our turnout overall.”
Trump’s campaign has boasted about robust turnout in the early vote among Republicans in states like Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia, a switch from 2020, after the party made a concerted push to rack up points at the front end.
“President Donald J. Trump is going into Election Day stronger than he has in any previous election and if patriots across the country keep the momentum and turn out as expected on Election Day, we will be swearing in President Trump in January,” Tim Saler, a data consultant for Trump and the Republican National Committee, said in a statement.
Harris’ team warned Monday that election results in some states might take a couple of days, signaling that a delay in the vote count is expected and would not be a sign of voter fraud. Trump, who still has not conceded his 2020 loss against Biden, has begun laying the groundwork to contest election results if he loses again.
Polls start fully closing in states at 7 p.m. ET, including in the battleground state of Georgia.
