WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump on Monday hopscotched across swing states and prepared for what could be an exceedingly tense election night watch as the 2024 presidential election sped to a close.
So far, more than 80.6 million Americans have voted, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab.
In a presidential contest that pollsters say is virtually a toss-up, seven battleground states likely will determine the outcome of the election. The results could take days, election officials repeatedly have warned and stressed again Monday. The 2020 presidential race was called for President Joe Biden the Saturday following Election Day.
“Election Day is not results day,” said Quentin Turner, the Common Cause Michigan executive director, during a Monday webinar.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, chair of the Harris-Walz campaign, made similar remarks during a Monday call with reporters, but still issued predictions as to when the campaign expects to know some results from key states.
She said the campaign understands that results could take a while based on each state’s law. Some states begin counting votes after the polls close, some as they come in.
O’Malley Dillon said because of that, the campaign expects on election night to have “near complete results” for North Carolina, Michigan and Georgia, “and then partial results from Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona.”
She said the campaign expects by Wednesday morning to have most of the “results in from Wisconsin and additional results from Pennsylvania and potentially Michigan.”
“And then on Wednesday and beyond, we expect additional results from Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada,” she said. “So we think some of this stuff will trickle in, but keep in mind that some ballots will continue to be counted for many days.”
In Alaska the statewide candidates races for the lone U.S. House and Alaska State Legislature may not be known in some instances for two weeks due to the state’s ranked choice voting system. Races that don’t have a candidate with a majority of first-choice votes will have the subsequent choices marked on ballots tallied two weeks after Election Day.
National democracy groups like Common Cause said during the webinar that they are prepared for high voter turnout on Election Day.
Bob Phillips, the Common Cause North Carolina executive director, said he expects about 1 to 1.5 million voters in his state on Election Day.
“For the most part, we’ve seen a lot of voter enthusiasm,” he said.
He added that there have been more calls on the voter help hotline than in the previous elections.
“There is definitely higher tension, more emotion, particularly among the electioneering that goes on outside the precincts, as well as some issues since this is our first major election where we’ve had the voter ID requirements,” Phillips said.
It’s all about Pennsylvania (almost)
Harris is closing out her campaign in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, which offers the most electoral votes of the swing states at 19.
O’Malley Dillon said the campaign will have get-out-the-vote rallies late Monday night in the seven swing states with Harris and surrogates.
“We’ve believed all along this race is going to be incredibly close, and so it’s really going to come down to mobilization, and that’s why an event like tonight matters so much,” she said.
Harris will head to Scranton and then to Allentown, a city with a large Puerto Rican population that Democrats have courted following racist remarks by a comedian at a Trump rally that referred to the island of Puerto Rico as “garbage.” She’ll then rally in Philadelphia with musical performances from The Roots and Lady Gaga among others.
Trump will make four stops in three states — starting in Raleigh, North Carolina, stopping twice in Pennsylvania at Reading and Pittsburgh and finishing in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
While at his first campaign stop in North Carolina on Monday, he told supporters that if he wins another term he will levy a 25% tariff on Mexico if migrants continue to head from that country to the U.S.-Mexico border.
“You’re the first I’ve told this to,” Trump told the crowd. “And if that doesn’t work, we’ll go up to 50. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll go to 75.”
Trump will hold his election night watch party at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida. Harris will have hers at her alma mater at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
Polling puzzles
Polls published over the weekend still showed a tight race, but one in Iowa rattled the Trump campaign, showing that Harris had a lead in a state that the former president easily won in 2016 and 2020.
The highly regarded pollster — somewhat of a Midwestern oracle — showed that independent and women voters were breaking for Harris.
Both candidates are within the margin of error in all seven swing states meaning any of the states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin — could tip to either one.
Over the weekend, Harris appeared on NBC’s live sketch comedy show, “Saturday Night Live.” Trump also appeared on a free commercial during NBC’s broadcast of a Sunday NASCAR race in compliance with the FCC’s Equal Time rule.
On Sunday, while at Michigan State University, Harris pledged that she would do “everything in her power” to end the war in Gaza if she were to win the White House. Michigan has a high Arab American population that has been critical of Democrats’ handling of the Israel-Hamas war, where more than 44,000 Palestinians have been killed.
During a Sunday rally in Pennsylvania, Trump told supporters that he shouldn’t have left the White House after losing the 2020 presidential race and then he joked about not minding if journalists were shot while covering his campaign event.
• Ariana Figueroa covers the nation’s capital for States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization. Her areas of coverage include politics and policy, lobbying, elections and campaign finance. Alaska Beacon, an affiliate of States Newsroom, is an independent, nonpartisan news organization focused on connecting Alaskans to their state government.
