In the final stretch of an exceedingly tight presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump are targeting people’s fears as they barnstorm across the country to eke out wins in seven battleground states where polls show razor-thin margins.
Trump, who has raised dire warnings about crime and border security since the start of the 2024 race, has more recently dumped millions of dollars into a barrage of swing-state ads that seek to stoke fear around transgender people — playing to the notion that Harris, a longtime supporter of the LGBTQ+ community, is a “woke” Californian and too progressive to be president.
Harris, who has for months flagged concerns about Trump’s fitness for office, has ratcheted up messaging about his penchant for dictatorial pronouncements, his election denial and role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, and the warnings from several of his own former military advisors that he is a threat to national security.
The fear-based messages have saturated campaign advertising in swing states, where voters in past presidential contests were met with messaging on regional issues such as farming or manufacturing.
“Politics has just become so nationalized that some of these more drilled-down strategies aren’t showing up as much as you would have expected in years past,” said Robert Alexander, a political science professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and author of the 2019 book “Representation and the Electoral College.”
“Everything is on its head,” Alexander said. “There are so many people who are just frustrated with the world, period, and they’re thinking, ‘Where do I go?’”
That uncertainty is reflected in the close margins in the battlegrounds, and in the campaigns’ strategies for the final push to Nov. 5. Neither major-party candidate has decided to go all-in on a single possible path to victory on the electoral map, with both choosing instead to use their considerable campaign resources to play the entire field.
Charlie Gerow, a longtime Republican strategist and political consultant in Pennsylvania, said the result has been an extremely intense election cycle in the so-called Blue Wall battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and the Sunbelt swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.
“There [have] been so many ads it’s hard to keep track,” Gerow said. “We have been inundated in ways that I couldn’t even imagine.”
Dan Kanninen, the Harris campaign’s battleground states director, said in a recent statement that Harris still has “multiple pathways” to 270 electoral votes.
“All seven battleground states are in play, and we know each will be incredibly close,” Kallinen said.
Brian Hughes, a Trump campaign senior advisor, said in a statement that Trump has been doing multiple campaign events per day, and that in the race’s final weeks he “will visit every battleground state at least once.”
“We have a broad and diverse coalition of a united GOP, disaffected Democrats and independents, and we all know that President Trump’s common-sense agenda for working men and women is resonating,” Hughes said.
Both Harris and Trump are doing quintessential October campaigning, telling voters in big cities and rural pockets alike that they care about their concerns and will work for their interests in the White House. But they also are focusing on messages that speak to national issues and the broad anxieties that many Americans feel about the future of the nation.
Harris, keen on shoring up her support in communities of color but also bringing more moderate Republicans to her cause, has appeared alongside Democrats, such as former President Obama, and prominent Republican defectors, such as Liz Cheney, to make the case that Trump is a unique threat to democracy, reproductive healthcare and the working class.
Harris has argued that Trump will usher in the archconservative policies of Project 2025 and prioritize tax breaks for the rich. She has accused him of being easily manipulated and goaded by world leaders and dictators, and of being a would-be dictator himself.
She planned to rally in Texas for reproductive healthcare rights alongside Beyoncé on Friday. The red state is not a presidential battleground, but the Harris campaign called it “ground zero” for the sort of abortion restrictions that have exploded since the U.S. Supreme Court — including three Trump appointees — toppled longstanding legal protections for such procedures in 2022.
Harris planned to be in Michigan with Michelle Obama on Saturday, and to be back in Pennsylvania on Sunday.
Next Tuesday, Harris is scheduled to make a “closing argument” for her campaign on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., near where Trump rallied the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election. A senior Harris campaign official said the event is intended to be symbolic — to clarify the real choice facing voters.
Trump, who expects his fervent base to turn out for him no matter what, is hoping that widespread economic frustration and fears about immigration and border security will bring him the added votes he needs to win. His campaign has focused on the simple message that Americans are worse off than they were four years ago, though he has caused distractions by going off script in bizarre ways — including with his recent tangent about the late Arnold Palmer’s genitalia.
Trump has argued that Harris will usher in a dangerously progressive, California-style agenda that will cater to immigrants and crater the economy. He has sought to tie Harris to high inflation and failures along the southern border during the Biden administration, and to cast Harris as weak on the international stage.
The Republican is scheduled to deliver remarks in Texas on Friday about “migrant crime,” then to campaign at rallies in Michigan later Friday and on Saturday.
On Sunday, Trump plans to host a major rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. New York is blue and also not a swing state — but an event at the famous venue promises major media exposure for Trump that will reach the swing states.
In addition to the two major candidates, swarms of their surrogates are also rushing around the country — including their vice presidential nominees. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, and Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, have been crisscrossing the country as much as Harris and Trump.
The two campaigns’ robust travel schedules are a result in part of the race’s utter unpredictability — and the extreme closeness of the polling in many states.
“In an election where the seven battleground states are all polling within a percentage point or two, 50-50 is the only responsible forecast,” Nate Silver, founder and former editor of FiveThirtyEight, began in a piece for the New York Times on Wednesday — before writing that his own “gut” told him that Trump is probably going to win, but added that voters shouldn’t “put any value whatsoever on anyone’s gut” — including Silver’s.
Gerow, the Republican strategist in Pennsylvania, said he has “always been very bullish” on Trump’s chances of winning the state, and thus the entire race, but never more so than he is now. He said most of the people he talks to are voting for Trump, even Democrats who don’t like Trump — who he said are telling him things like, “I think the guy is an a——, but I’m voting for him.”
Keneshia Grant, an associate professor of political science at Howard University, said she thinks the current polling has “probably underestimated the potential excitement about Harris as a Black woman candidate.”
Grant, author of “The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century,” said researchers have long identified problems with polling in statewide and national races where Black candidates were on the ballot, and the same could be happening with Harris, the first Black woman and Asian American to ever top a major party ticket.
“The campaigns are doing things based on what they understand the status of the world to be,” Grant said. “But I just worry or wonder whether the state of the world is what we think it is.”
Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said both Harris and Trump are acting in relatively predictable ways in this final stretch. Harris clearly believes there are some “gettable Republican voters” out there and is going after them. Trump is projecting confidence but is also campaigning aggressively and “not treating it like it’s in the bag.”
Both candidates are still looking for that perfect message — that “magic bullet” — that will swing the race decidedly in their favor, but neither has found it yet, Kondik said.
“It may just be really close until the end,” he said, “and really close over all.”