WASHINGTON — A campaign that has featured a felony conviction, a televised assassination attempt and a late withdrawal of a sitting president has reached its final weekend with the same chasm that has dominated American politics for the last decade: between voters who fear former President Trump will destroy the country and those who believe it has already lost its way.
“We have a wonderful system of government,” said Susan Markowitz, a 72-year-old attorney from Doylestown, Pa., who showed up at a recent event for Vice President Kamala Harris. “That is in danger if Mr. Trump gets back into office.”
“He’s not the status quo,” said Dave Duncan, a 58-year-old salesman from Macomb Township, Mich., who supports Trump. “And I think that’s a lot of times the thing that people like about him.”
Trump and Harris are spending the last campaign weekend pressing voters to turn out for what both say is an existential choice. Polls show the race is essentially tied, within a margin that has budged little since Harris replaced President Biden as the Democratic nominee in late July.
It’s an unusual race, and not just because Biden, 81, withdrew with fewer than four months to go due to growing concerns that he wasn’t up to the job at his age.
Trump could become the first president elected as a felon, and the first who tried to overturn an election and incite an insurrection — the rare candidate, in any democracy, who has openly threatened to use the military and the courts to go after political foes he calls “the enemy from within.” Yet he has managed to turn those normally disqualifying deeds on their head, positioning himself with about half the electorate as the ultimate change agent for a system that he paints as corrupt.
Fewer than a third of voters believe the country is on the right track, according to polls. — a finding that would normally spell doom for Democrats as the incumbent party. Concerns about Trump’s fitness for office have kept the race competitive.
Voters’ desire for change has complicated Harris’ task as she attempts to become the first woman — and the first woman of color — to win the White House. She has struggled to answer how she would govern differently than Biden, who is deeply unpopular. Though a sitting vice president, she has tried to position herself as the “turn the page” candidate by casting Trump and his rhetoric as the cause of that national malaise.
“People are exhausted with him,” Harris said last week.
She has highlighted dire warnings from her Republican rival’s former closest advisors that a second Trump term would be more dangerous than the first, with little to stop him from avenging his enemies using the courts and the military, or from aligning with autocrats against American allies and altering fundamental rights of Americans as he carries out promises to be a “dictator on Day 1” in office.
“Either it’s Donald Trump, sitting in there, stewing, stewing over his enemies list; or me, with your help, working for you, checking off my to-do list,” Harris said at a recent rally.
Trump has disparaged Harris’ intelligence and has claimed that migrants have turned America into “an occupied country” and a “garbage can for the world,” promising his election would mean a “liberation day” when he puts “these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail.”
“This election is a choice between whether we will have four more years of gross incompetence and failure or whether we will begin the four greatest years in the history of our country,” Trump said in his closing speech at Madison Square Garden last week.
The two candidates have spent most of their time and effort on just seven battleground states that are expected to decide the election: Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina.
A recent Monmouth poll in Pennsylvania, the most populous swing state, showed why the race is so hard to predict: Trump led by 1 percentage point among registered voters, and retains that lead when the poll results are modeled on the pool of voters who cast ballots in 2020. Harris leads when the poll is modeled on the 2022 midterm election turnout. A final model, of “extremely motivated voters,” puts the race at a tie.
Both candidates visited Wisconsin on Friday, while on Saturday, Trump was scheduled to visit Virginia and North Carolina and Harris was headed to North Carolina and Georgia.
In swing states, voters are feeling the outsized attention acutely. Nearly every corner of Phoenix and its suburbs is dominated by a colorful collection of campaign signs of every political stripe.
Voters streamed into a Scottsdale voting center last week, greeted by activists from both major parties who flanked the parking lot entrance to hand out voter guides — a conservative in a red shirt on the right and two progressives in blue on the left.
Surrogates for both campaigns have fanned out across Arizona in the final days, appealing to different target groups that Trump and Harris need to swing the divided state.
Jeff Flake, who served in the U.S. Senate and as ambassador to Turkey, joined other prominent Arizona Republicans for a “Republicans for Harris-Walz” news conference. Harris has pointedly been courting Republicans disaffected with their nominee, and Flake told attendees that he supported her “not in spite of being a conservative Republican, but because of [it].”
A passerby threw a comment in Flake’s direction: “RINO!”
Both Harris and Trump are “targeting the same undecided, last-minute group,” said Celinda Lake, Biden’s 2020 pollster, who is conducting focus groups for Democrats aligned with Harris’ campaign.
The remaining persuadable voters — about 4% of the electorate — tend to consume less information about politics. Many are non-college-educated women who dislike Trump’s rhetoric and style but view him as a businessman who would be better for the economy, Lake said. They know less about Harris but see her as risky, in part because she is a woman — and one of color, Lake said.
Trump has tried to appeal to undecided voters by increasing fear about crime, immigration, social issues and the economy, along with gendered and race-based attacks on Harris’ intelligence.
The outcome will probably depend on whether Harris can persuade at least some of these voters not only that she can handle the job, but that Trump presents a fundamental threat.
“A lot of people just think, ‘Oh, I can survive it. I’m unsure so I’ll just go for Trump because of the economy,’” Lake said of her findings from focus groups. “She has to make him as risky as she is.”
Trump and his allies believe Harris’ message will not resonate as much as immigration and the economy.
“Saying democracy is under attack is just a more amorphous thing,” said Sean Spicer, who was one of Trump’s White House press secretaries.
Polls and history suggest voters want change, in large part because inflation earlier in Biden’s term, coupled with high interest rates, made many worried about affording groceries and housing. Other economic indicators, including low unemployment and lower inflation in recent months, suggest a healthy economy. But many voters do not see it that way.
“The economy is all I’m worried about — nothing else,” said Joe Rice, a 60-year-old cashier from Philadelphia.
Rice is Black and a lifelong Democrat, but was considering a change because he has struggled to live on his $18-an-hour wage.
“Trump was a little bit more easy living when he was in there, even though there’s a divide with the little skinhead stuff and all that,” Rice said.
Harris has tried to win over voters like Rice with proposals aimed at assuring the middle class, such as stipends for first-time homebuyers, a Medicare expansion for at-home nursing, an expansion of the child tax credit. She has pointed to a consensus among economists that Trump’s plans for large tariffs would raise the price of everyday goods substantially, calling them essentially an increase in the sales tax.
Some polls show Harris has drawn closer to Trump when voters are asked who would better handle the economy, but Trump has led on the issue in most surveys. Harris’ efforts to chip away at that gap could mitigate her deficits among male voters. Her substantial edge with female voters, many of them animated by anger over the loss of abortion rights, could propel her to victory.
Harris has emphasized that issue almost as much as Trump has talked about immigration, often by drawing attention to women who have been denied medical care during troubled pregnancies and miscarriages.
Trump has fewer detailed plans. But in addition to proposing record-high tariffs on imported goods, he has promised or floated ideas to eliminate a variety of taxes, including on tipped wages, overtime, car loans and even income in general. Economists say that would not leave enough money to fund the government.
But even as Trump’s advisors urge him to stick with the economy and attacks on Harris as too liberal, he has frequently veered into meandering, sometimes incomprehensible rants at his rallies about such topics as Arnold Palmer’s penis size and false claims about legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, stealing household pets to eat them.
Candice Gonzalez, a widow caring for three autistic children in the Detroit suburbs, said she was picking Harris as “the lesser of two evils.”
“He’s just not a good person,” Gonzalez, 54, said of Trump.
Bierman reported from Washington and Pinho from Phoenix. Times staff writer James Rainey contributed to this report from Los Angeles.
