Harris overtakes Trump in new polls as VP's rally is moved due to safety concerns on eve of 'knife-edge' US election
4 November 2024, 14:15
Kamala Harris has overtaken Donald Trump in a swathe of key swing state polls as the candidates make their final pitch to voters on the eve of election day.
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The vice president and Democrat nominee took a marginal lead in the final New York Times/Siena College poll, making gains in Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Georgia - four key battleground states that the candidates need to win to become president.
Ms Harris' campaign was also celebrating news from the weekend that she now led in traditional Republican stronghold Iowa, according to Selzer, a widely respected polling organisation with a good record in the state.
Amid the boost to her bid for the White House, Ms Harris will today campaign in Pennsylvania - considered the most important swing state to win - alongside a host of famous faces including Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, Ricky Martin, Katy Perry and Christina Aquilera.
She was last night forced to move one of the Pennsylvania rallies, due to be held at Point State Park in Pittsburgh after the Secret Service declared the site “unsafe”. It will now take place in the city's Heinze History Center.
It is unclear why agents designated the site "unsafe" but follows a series of assassination attempts against her rival Trump over the course of the presidential campaign.
Read More: Live: Harris and Trump make final pitch to voters before US election
Trump is also concentrating his campaign's focus on Pennsylvania, where he will continue delivering rallies in Reading and Pittsburgh before closing in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
It comes after he renewed his false claims on Sunday that US elections are rigged against him and said he "shouldn't have left" the White House in 2021.
Reacting to the polls placing Ms Harris ahead in the final days of campaigning, the Republican nominee predicted he would win the vote in a “landslide” and warned that his prospective second term would be “nasty”.
Over the weekend he also suggested former Rep. Liz Cheney, a prominent Republican critic, wouldn’t be willing to support foreign wars if she had “nine barrels shooting at her.”
Some 77 million Americans have already voted in the election, casting their ballots early, but Ms Harris and Trump are pushing to turn out many millions more supporters on Tuesday. Either result on election day will yield a historic outcome.
A Trump victory would make him the first incoming president to have been indicted and convicted of a felony, after his hush-money trial in New York.
He will gain the power to end other federal investigations pending against him. Mr Trump would also become the second president in history to win non-consecutive White House terms, after Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century.
Ms Harris is vying to become the first woman, first black woman and first person of South Asian descent to reach the Oval Office, four years after she broke the same barriers in national office by becoming President Joe Biden's second-in-command.
The vice president ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket after Mr Biden's disastrous performance in a debate in June set in motion his withdrawal from the race. That was just one of a series of convulsions that have hit this year's campaign.
Ms Harris, 60, has played down the historic nature of her candidacy, which materialised only after the 81-year-old President ended his re-election bid after his June debate against the 78-year-old Mr Trump accentuated questions about Mr Biden's age.
Instead, Ms Harris has pitched herself as a generational change, emphasised her support for abortion rights after the US supreme court's 2022 decision ending the constitutional right to abortion services, and regularly noted the former president's role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
Assembling a coalition ranging from progressives like representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to Republican former vice president Dick Cheney, Ms Harris has called Mr Trump a threat to democracy, and late in the campaign even embraced the critique that Mr Trump has been accurately described as a "fascist".
Heading into Monday, Ms Harris has mostly stopped mentioning Mr Trump. She is promising to solve problems and seek consensus, while sounding an almost exclusively optimistic tone reminiscent of her campaign's opening days when she embraced "the politics of joy" and the campaign theme "Freedom".
Mr Trump, renewing his "Make America Great Again" and "America First" slogans, has made his hard-line approach to immigration and withering criticisms of Ms Harris and Mr Biden the anchors of his argument for a second administration.
He has hammered Democrats for an inflationary American economy, and pledged to lead an economic "golden age", end international conflicts and seal the US southern border.
But Mr Trump also has veered into grievances over being prosecuted after trying to overturn Mr Biden's victory and repeatedly denigrated the country he wants to lead again as a "failed nation".
The election is likely to be decided across seven states. Mr Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016 only to see them flip to Mr Biden in 2020. North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada add the Sun Belt swath of the presidential battleground map.
Mr Trump won North Carolina twice and lost Nevada twice. He won Arizona and Georgia in 2016 but saw them slip to Democrats in 2020.
Ms Harris' team has projected confidence in recent days, pointing to a large gender gap in early voting data and research showing late-deciding voters have broken her way. They also believe in the strength of their campaign infrastructure.
