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Donald Trump doubled down on Sunday on his baseless predictions of voter fraud in battleground states as he and rival US Vice-President Kamala Harris launched their frantic final 48 hours of campaigning to court the last holdouts in a bitterly contested US election.
The presidential race is going down to the wire, with more states functionally tied in polls at this point than in any comparable election.
Over 77.3 million people have now voted ahead of election day on Tuesday, just over half of the total ballots cast in 2020.
With the hours ticking away, 78-year-old Trump again indicated he may not accept a defeat and added to his increasingly dark rhetoric by musing to supporters that he wouldn’t mind if journalists were shot.
Democrats are “demonic”, he told a crowd in Lititz, Pennsylvania, also telling his own supporters they would be “stupid” if they don’t vote.
The Republican often sprinkles speeches with colourful insults, but the tone has become increasingly apocalyptic and tinged with violence.
Despite no evidence of any meaningful election cheating in the United States, he claimed Democrats in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania “are fighting so hard to steal this damn thing”.
And during his often unfocused 90-minute address, he recalled the near-miss assassination attempt against him in July, adding that for him to be shot again the bullet would have to pass through the crowd of media.
“To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news – and I don’t mind that so much. I don’t mind that,” he said to laughter.
Around the same time, Harris was quoting scripture in a majority-black church in Detroit, Michigan and urging Americans to look beyond Trump.
“Let us turn the page and write the next chapter of our history,” Harris said.
US Vice-President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris greets people at Kuzzo's Chicken & Waffles restaurant in Detroit, Michigan on November 3, 2024. Photo / AFP
“While we know there are those who seek to deepen divisions, sow hate, spread fear and cause chaos, this moment in our nation has to be about so much more than partisan politics.”
Harris called Trump’s accusations of election fraud an attempt to make people feel “their vote won’t matter”.
“The systems that are in place for this election in 2024 have integrity,” she said. “The people will determine the outcome of this election.”
Harris also said she has mailed in her absentee ballot to California, and was “feeling great” about the 48-hour sprint.
A final New York Times/Siena poll on Sunday flagged incremental changes in swing states, but the results from all seven remained within the margin of error.
Harris – desperate to shore up the Great Lakes states known as the “blue wall” and seen as essential to any Democratic victory – was spending the day in Michigan, where she also heads to Pontiac and an evening rally at Michigan State University.
Trump’s Sunday timetable centred on Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia, the three biggest swing-state prizes in the Electoral College system that awards states influence according to their population.
On Sunday, Trump made a rare admission to ABC News that “I guess you could lose, can lose. I mean, that happens, right?”
But at his Pennsylvania rally he said that in 2020, when he lost his re-election effort to current US President Joe Biden and then tried to overturn the results, he “shouldn’t have left” the White House.
Final polls
Like Pennsylvania, Michigan is among the closely watched battlegrounds.
Trump flipped the former Democratic stronghold on his way to defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016. Biden returned it to the Democratic column in 2020, buoyed by unionised workers and black voters.
But this time, Harris risks losing the support of a 200,000-strong Arab-American community that has denounced Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
Pollsters have noted an erosion in black support for the Democratic ticket and Harris’s aides acknowledge they still have work to do to turn out enough African-American men to match Biden’s winning 2020 coalition.
But with abortion rights a top voter concern, her campaign has taken some comfort from the large proportion of women turning out among early voters.
Harris got a boost on Saturday as the final Des Moines Register poll for Iowa – seen as a highly credible test of wider public sentiment – showed a stunning turnaround, with Harris ahead in a state won easily by Trump in 2016 and 2020.
