The tumultuous 2024 election ends with a contrast that sums up America’s fateful choice on the eve of the election.

Former President Donald Trump darkens what is already the most dystopian final argument in modern American history and making new baseless claims that the Democrats are cheating.

Vice President Kamala Harriswhile warning of the perils of a second Trump term, claims momentum and invokes optimism and aspiration as she calls for a “new generation of leadership in America.”

Voters – more than 75 million of whom have already voted – finally find themselves facing an election that could profoundly change the country and the world and that makes citizens on both sides fear for their way of life if their candidate loses. .

Nervous tensions reach a fever pitch as Trump and Harris head into the swing states likely to decide a race marked by extraordinary twists and turns that nevertheless ends neck and neck in the polls.

The former president will begin Monday in North Carolina — a state Republicans are long expected to lock down — before heading to Pennsylvania, which could end up deciding the winner. He will close his third presidential campaign with a nighttime rally in Michigan. Harris, who held her last rally in Michigan on Sunday, will spend Monday in another vital blue wall state, Pennsylvania, including a grand arrival in Philadelphia with Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.

Trump gets more extreme at the moment in explosions that seem to augur a new attempt to defy the will of voters in the event of defeat. For example, he falsely claimed Sunday in Pennsylvania that Democrats are “fighting so hard to steal the damn thing” and that voting machines would be tampered with, while claiming he should not have left the White House in 2021 .

Harris is trying to rekindle the sense of joy and possibility that permeated her early campaign rallies. On Sunday, in a black church in Detroit, she condemned those who “sow hatred, sow fear and sow chaos”, in reference to her rival. “Over the next two days we will be tested,” she said. “We were born for such a time as this.”

But the vice president also sought to summon the better angels of American nature, striking ambitious notes that her Republican foe long abandoned. Harris said Saturday in North Carolina: “I have lived the promise of America. And today, I see the promise of America in everyone who is here. In each of you, in each of us. We are the promise of America.

History calls us

If Trump wins on Tuesday, he will be only the second defeated president to win a non-consecutive term. He will achieve one of the most stunning political comebacks of all time after trying to set democracy on fire to stay in power after the 2020 elections, being convicted of a crime and escaping two attempts at assassination this year.

Harris could break the nearly 250-year line of male commanders in chief and become the first female president. It would be a stunning feat after she unified the demoralized Democratic Party in July, when President Joe Biden’s re-election bid was destroyed by the ravages of age.

On the final day of the campaign, the enormous stakes of the election are reinforced by the feeling that no one can say who will win.

Polls nationally and in swing states show no clear leader, reflecting a country as polarized as it was at the start of the race. But it remains possible that a candidate was able to build a late advantage in battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona, and that he could achieve a larger victory than expected.

Democrats are encouraged by the apparently strong turnout of female voters, with abortion rights a potentially central issue in the first presidential election since the Trump-built Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Harris has also worked to repair cracks in the traditional system. Democratic coalition, trying to appeal to black men and Latino voters in particular.

Trump is banking on voters weary of high food and housing prices and still feeling the trauma of now-cooled inflation, and he has demonized undocumented migrants to highlight a crisis at the southern border. The Biden administration has struggled for months to recognize the severity of each problem and come up with effective remedies, meaning the seeds of Harris’ eventual defeat may have been sown long ago. And Trump’s team is confident he will eat away at traditional minority Democratic constituencies and bring out again people who don’t typically vote.

But there are also worrying signs from Trump. His behavior already looks like another attempt to overturn the result if he loses, after his conduct after the last election led to an invasion of the US Capitol by supporters who beat police and attempted to thwart the certification of the Biden victory. Harris has said she is prepared to respond if the ex-president makes a premature declaration of victory, and her maneuvers suggest that, absent a clear victory for either side, the Uncertainty over the election could last several days.

The end of Trumpism – or the beginning of an extremely new era?

This is no ordinary election, in large part because of the latent presence of Trump, already the most disruptive president of the modern era, who promises unfettered strongman rule if he wins back the Oval Office. If he keeps his own promises, the twice-impeached Republican nominee would subject America’s governmental, judicial and constitutional institutions to their greatest test in generations during a term he vows to entrench in vengeance personal.

Trump has presented the darkest and most authoritarian agenda of any presidential candidate in modern memory. He proposes the largest mass expulsion of migrants ever carried out – an operation that, by definition, would involve law enforcement and perhaps even the military in a nationwide crackdown that would challenge civil liberties. He openly considered using the U.S. armed forces against his political opponents whom he called “enemies within” and vermin, mimicking the language of some of history’s most notorious tyrants.

The ex-president also proposes a transformation of the economy on behalf of American workers who flocked to his populist and nationalist message after seeing their livelihoods destroyed by decades of globalization. But his love of tariffs risks provoking a backlash that could set back the economy. Trump also plans a purge of Washington bureaucrats and the elimination of agencies like the Justice Department that constrained him during his first term and which he wants to use as a weapon to expunge his criminal charges and satisfy his personal whims and policies.

More than nine years after entering the presidential battle, Trump may be as strong politically as he has ever been. He has crushed dissent within the GOP and cemented his unshakable bond with tens of millions of Americans who believe he speaks for them and confounds the elites they say disdain them.

Yet Harris heads into Election Day with a chance to end the Trump era and inflict a second straight election defeat on a Republican Party that has quieted its lies and threats against the Constitution in its uncompromising pursuit of power.

It offers voters the chance to avoid the tumult and peril to the rule of law that Trump’s own campaign suggests it represents. The vice president is also proposing reforms to improve the lives of American workers — but hers are less revolutionary than Trump’s. She promises measures to make housing more affordable, to combat what she calls price gouging by supermarket giants and to ensure better health care at more reasonable prices.

Harris took a risk in providing continuity at a time of deep dissatisfaction with domestic economic and political realities and growing concern at home about a world in which tyrants are on the march. She also struggled to part with an 81-year-old president who was deeply unpopular despite presiding over the industrialized world’s most robust economic recovery since the Covid-19 pandemic.

A campaign that came to life with a burst of joy is ending with the harshest warnings that Trump is a fascist who could destroy America’s democratic way of life, alienate America’s allies and subjugate the image national vitality of the country while he genuflects to the autocrats in Russia and China whom he apparently wishes to imitate.

The road to 270

Harris’ best path to the presidency is through the blue-walled Democratic states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The CNN poll, which averages the last five nonpartisan surveys, shows no clear leader in any of the three. CNN/SSRS surveys as of last week, Harris had a slight edge in the top two of those states and a tie in the Keystone State. If she loses Pennsylvania, Harris will need a combination of other key states, including Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, where polling averages also show no clear leader. If Trump wins Pennsylvania — as he did in 2016 — he could take a big step toward a second term.

The vice president’s campaign claimed she was generating late momentum in the race. “It helps, from experience, to close a presidential campaign with late voters in the double digits and the remaining undecideds seeming friendlier to you than your opponent,” David Plouffe, a Harris adviser, wrote on X Friday. .

Democrats experienced a new burst of optimism Saturday when the latest campaign poll from the Des Moines Register and Mediacom showed Harris at 47% and Trump at 44% among likely voters in a state he easily won in 2020 and 2016. That margin is within the poll’s 3.4-point margin of sampling error and suggests the absence of a clear leader in the state. But the results, which suggested a shift in Harris’ favor from the previous Iowa poll in September, also showed the vice president had a strong advantage among women. If such a pattern repeats nationally, the vice president could be headed to victory if she can limit her deficit to Trump among white men, in particular.

The Trump campaign sent scathing memos attacking the Iowa poll and a series of New York Times/Siena College investigations. And the ex-president immediately used this new data to bolster his claim that he was the victim of a rigged election. “We’ve been waiting for this for nine years, and we’re two days in, and we’ve got all this bullshit with the press, with fake stuff and fake polls,” he said in Pennsylvania.

But a few hours before election day, no vote matters anymore. Americans are about to make their choice.

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