US Vice-President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks earlier this month. Photo / AFP
CAMPAIGN DAIRY
With one day of campaigning to go in the US presidential election,both campaigns are converging on Pennsylvania. Living up to its nickname as “the Keystone State”, Pennsylvania has become central to both campaigns’ race to take the White House.
Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, and his Democrat rival, Vice-President Kamala Harris, have been touring the seven swing states this week, each doing several rallies across multiple states in a day in a bid to eke out a win in a race that polls currently show as neck and neck.
Both campaigns are pulling out the stops, with Trump showing impressive stamina in a four-rally, three-state tour, whilst Harris carpet bombs urban Pennsylvania with celebrity endorsements. In an apparent concession that we won’t have a clear winner on Tuesday night: the Harris campaign has organised two post-election events for its donors: an election night party, but also a briefing the day after the election for members of the Harris Victory Fund, a group of donors, to monitor election results, according to leaked emails seen by the New York Times.
On Tuesday, Trump and his running mate JD Vance are touring Pennsylvania, with Trump holding a rally in Reading and Pittsburg. Trump is keeping an impressive schedule. His final day will begin in North Carolina with a rally in Raleigh and finish in Michigan with a rally at 10.30pm.
Trump is still trying to control the fallout from a comedian calling the island of Puerto Rico an “island of garbage” at a Madison Square Garden rally in New York a week ago. Latino voters are key for both Trump and Harris, and Trump had been making inroads among Latino voters, particularly men. An NBC/Telemundo/CNBC poll from October found the candidates tied on 47% support among Latino men, although Harris’ lead among women meant that overall she was more popular with 54% to 40%.
In his first rally of the day in North Carolina, Trump continued to distance himself from the joke, saying, “we helped Puerto Rico more than anybody … they love me and I love them”. Trump’s actual record in office suggests otherwise. An investigation from the Department of Homeland Security inspector general found his White House had delayed US$20 billion in relief funds for the island following hurricanes in 2018 and 2019.
Trump is threading a difficult needle on immigration, harnessing deep anger and resentment from some of his supporters at the sheer number of migrants in the country illegally without America’s significant migrant communities. He appears to have done this successfully, largely by cultivating resentment at those who migrate illegally, who tend to pique the ire of born Americans and legal migrants alike.
At the Trump rally I attended over the weekend, he mentioned migration 24 times, saying that while polls pointed towards the economy being the number one issue for voters, he believed migration was more important. He also used migration to reach out to a broader coalition of voters, beyond his white base.
“Black voters are furious with Kamala over illegal immigration. It’s destroying their communities and if this continues, there will have been no political power left for them,” Trump said.
Two black men sitting next to me applauded in agreement (they, like about 100 other people, also left the rally early, having listened to Trump for more than an hour).
“All of their communities will be majority migrant. That’s what’s happening. You are gonna have majority migrant because the democrats want to get them votes, they want to get them enlisted to vote,” Trump said.
Trump has promised a mass deportation of illegal migrants, if elected.
“We’re going to get them out of here fast. I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered and we will put the vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them the hell out of our country,” he said.
Statistics on the topic can be a bit shaky given illegal migrants tend not to want to self-identify as such, however, US border officials record “encounters” with migrants, which includes people who attempted to cross illegally and people who tried to enter legally but were deemed inadmissible.
“Encounters” have skyrocketed under Biden. Under the Trump administration, there were 2.4 million encounters on this border. That has risen to more than 10 million (as of September) under Biden, of which about 8 million came over the land border with Mexico. This is still just half the 21 million claimed by Trump, but it’s certainly a useful number to argue the merits of, say, a large and expensive border wall. It’s also incredibly damaging for Harris, to whom President Joe Biden gave responsibility for the border.
Harris also has a busy day, starting in Scranton, before speaking at a rally in Allentown before a final push in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
She’s pulling out all the stops for this final event; Oprah Winfrey will be there and Lady Gaga will be performing. The rally will be set against the backdrop of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, made famous for the steps which were used as a location in the Rocky movies (the titular boxer runs up them and raises his fists whilst looking back over the city).
Philadelphia itself is incredibly friendly territory for Harris, with 81.21% of people in the county voting for Biden in 2020, but she will want to ensure every one of her supporters turns out to vote to balance Trump gains in the rest of the state. Pennsylvanians have displayed an enthusiasm for early voting this election, with numbers of returned mail-in ballots only slightly lower than they were during the mail-in frenzy seen during the pandemic.
The most recent data has 2.19m mail-in ballots being requested with 1.77m having been returned. Of those, 990,198 were returned by voters who are registered Democrats and therefore more likely to vote for Harris. Trump and the Republicans have been trying to encourage their supporters to voter early – something Republicans have tended to be resistant to.
The latest statistics suggest those efforts may have been working, but only slightly. Of the returned ballots in Pennsylvania from voters registered to the two major parties, about one in three (583,791) were Republican, compared to about 1 in four in 2020. An analysis by the Washington Post, however, suggests that this might simply be voter “cannibalisation” in which someone who was always going to vote simply votes early rather than voting on the day. What’s more important is encouraging new voters to turn out and vote when they had not done so before.
The volume of these early ballots will be partly responsible for a slow count on election day, as Pennsylvanian officials are only allowed to open and count the ballots after 7am on election day (when they are also dealing with in-person voting), unlike other states which allow officials to begin counting them early. This could mean a very long, slow night on Tuesday.
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018. His travel to the United States was assisted by the US Embassy in Wellington.
Expectations tempered around return to surplus in 2027/28.