The Race For President: Breaking Down Vote Counting, Candidates & What To Expect

Harris And Trump’s Final Push Before Election Day Brings Them To The Same Patch Of Pennsylvania

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump made their final pitches to voters Monday in the same part of Pennsylvania at roughly the same time, spending the last full day of the presidential campaign in a state that could make or break their chances.

Focusing on Pennsylvania’s southeast corner, Trump took the stage in Reading, about 30 miles from Allentown, where Harris held her own event about half an hour later.

“If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole ball of wax,” Trump said. “It’s over.”

Indeed, a Trump victory in Pennsylvania, flipping its 19 Electoral College votes, would puncture the Democrats’ “blue wall” and make it harder for Harris to win the necessary 270 votes.

Harris, the Democratic nominee, spent all of Monday in Pennsylvania, the largest prize among the states expected to determine the Electoral College outcome, and offered a similarly blunt assessment.

“We need everyone in Pennsylvania to vote,” she said. “You are going to make the difference in this election.”

In addition to Allentown, Harris visited Scranton — the birthplace of President Joe Biden — and Reading and had a stop planned in Pittsburgh before ending with a late-night Philadelphia rally that was to include Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.

“Are you ready to do this?” Harris yelled Monday in Scranton, with a large handmade “VOTE FOR FREEDOM” sign behind her and a similar “VOTE” banner to her side.

Trump went first to North Carolina before visiting Reading. He then headed to Pittsburgh, at the opposite end of the state, before concluding in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he will hold his last campaign rally in the same place he concluded his 2016 and 2020 runs.

Southeast Pennsylvania is home to thousands of Latinos, including a sizable Puerto Rican population. Harris and her allies have repeatedly hit Trump for a comedian’s dig at Puerto Rico during the former president’s marquee Madison Square Garden event. The comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”

“It was absurd,” said German Vega, a Dominican American who lives in Reading and became a U.S. citizen in 2015. “It bothered so many people — even many Republicans. It wasn’t right, and I feel that Trump should have apologized to Latinos.”

But Emilio Feliciano, 43, waited outside Reading’s Santander Arena for a chance to take a photo of Trump’s motorcade. He dismissed the comments about Puerto Rico despite his family being Puerto Rican, saying he cares about the economy and that’s why he will vote for Trump.

“Is the border going to be safe? Are you going to keep crime down? That’s what I care about,” he said.

Harris told the crowd, “I stand here proud of my long-standing commitment to Puerto Rico and her people.”

“And I will be a president for all Americans,” she said, adding that “momentum is on our side. Can you feel it?”

Trump, meanwhile, stuck to talking about his proposed crackdown on immigration. He called to the stage Patty Morin, the mother of 37-year-old Rachel Morin, who was found dead a day after she went missing during a trip to go hiking. Officials say the suspect in her death, Victor Antonio Martinez Hernandez, entered the U.S. illegally after allegedly killing a woman in his home country of El Salvador.

About 77 million Americans have voted early. A victory by either side would be unprecedented.

Trump winning 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. Trump would also become only the second president in history to win nonconsecutive White House terms, after Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century.

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 Biden’s disastrous performance in a June debate set into motion his withdrawal from the race — one of a series of convulsions that hit this year’s campaign.

Trump survived by millimeters an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. His Secret Service detail foiled a second attempt in September, when a gunman had set up a rifle as Trump golfed at one of his courses in Florida.

Harris, 60, has pitched herself as a generational change from 81-year-old Biden and Trump, who is 78. She’s emphasized her support for abortion rights after the 2022 Supreme Court decision that ended the constitutional right to abortion services, and she has regularly noted the former president’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Assembling a coalition ranging from progressives such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney, Harris has called Trump a threat to democracy and late in the campaign even embraced the critique that Trump is accurately described as a “fascist.”

Heading into Monday, Harris has mostly stopped mentioning Trump by name, calling him instead “the other guy.” She is promising to solve problems and seek consensus.

Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said on a call with reporters that not saying Trump’s name was deliberate because voters “want to see in their leader an optimistic, hopeful, patriotic vision for the future.”

Harris also offered some insights into her personal formation as a politician that she doesn’t often divulge. In Scranton, she talked about once being a longshot while running for San Francisco district attorney in 2002 and how she “used to campaign with my ironing board.”

“I’d walk to the front of the grocery store, outside, and I would stand up my ironing board because, you see, an ironing board makes a really great standing desk,” the vice president said, recalling how she would tape her posters to the outside of the board, fill the top with flyers and “require people to talk to me as they walked in and out.”

In Allentown, Harris rallied with rapper Fat Joe. She then made her own visit to Reading after Trump’s rally had concluded, visiting Old San Juan Cafe, a Puerto Rican restaurant, with Ocasio-Cortez. Both Fat Joe, whose real name is Joseph Cartagena, and Ocasio-Cortez are of Puerto Rican heritage.

Supporters chanted “Sí se puede” and “Kamala” as the vice president’s motorcade pulled up. Once inside, Harris chatted with some diners, even mixing in “Gracias” and a few Spanish words. The vice president later ordered cassava, yellow rice and pork, saying, “I’m very hungry” as she noted that she’s been too busy campaigning to find time for many meals.

Afterward, Harris did some of her own canvassing, stopping at two homes in Reading while flanked by campaign volunteers.

“It’s the day before the election and I just wanted to come by and say I hope to earn your vote,” she said at one house.

The woman replied, “You already got my vote” and said her husband would be casting his ballot the next day.

Standing in line for Harris’ Allentown rally, 54-year-old Ron Kessler, an Air Force veteran and Republican-turned-Democrat, said he planned to vote for just the second time in his life. Kessler said that, for a long time, he didn’t vote, thinking the country “would vote for the correct candidate.”

But “now that I’m older and much more wiser, I believe it’s important, it’s my civic duty. And it’s important that I vote for myself and I vote for the democracy and the country.”

As recently as Sunday, Trump renewed his false claims that U.S. elections are rigged against him, mused about violence against journalists and said he “ shouldn’t have left” the White House in 2021 — dark turns that have overshadowed another anchor of his closing argument: “Kamala broke it. I will fix it.”

Related: Trump And Harris Make Last Push In Key Battleground States Ahead Of Election

Will The Polls Be Right In 2024? What Polling On The Presidential Race Can And Can’t Tell You

The presidential race is competitive.

That’s about as much as the national polls can tell us right now, even if it looks like Democrat Kamala Harris is down in one poll or Republican Donald Trump is up in another.

And that’s just fine.

Even though polls are sometimes treated as projections, they aren’t designed to tell you who is likely to win.

Polls are better for some things than others. Tracking shifts in voter intention is hard to do with a survey, particularly when the number of truly persuadable voters is relatively small. Voters’ opinions can change before Election Day and they often do. Horse race polls can only capture people’s viewpoints during a single moment in time. Even then, a margin that looks like one that could decide an election — say, one candidate has 48% support and the other has 45% support — might not be a real difference at all.

When reporters at The Associated Press are covering the election, horse race polling numbers don’t take center stage. The reason for this is that the AP believes that focusing on preelection polling can overstate the significance or reliability of those numbers.

Election-year polls are still useful, particularly when they’re trying to assess how the public is feeling about the candidates or the state of the country. They told us quite clearly, for instance, that many Americans wanted Democratic President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 race. But they’re not the same thing as an election result, and even a poll conducted just before Election Day still reflects opinion before all ballots have been cast.

Even in high-quality polls, each finding is just an estimate.

Polls are useful tools, but it’s important not to overstate their accuracy. After all, a polling organization can’t talk to every single person in the country. They instead rely on a sample to produce a statistically valid estimate of the views of all adults. Even though polls can give a reasonable approximation of the views of the larger group, the question is how much each finding could vary.

The margin of error, which all high-quality pollsters will share along with their results, helps capture some of that uncertainty. It means that in a poll with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, a finding that 47% of voters say they’ll support a particular candidate actually means that there’s a very good chance that anywhere between 50% and 44% of voters are supporting that candidate. If the other candidate has 45% support, which could really be anywhere from 42% to 48%, the 2 percentage point difference isn’t statistically meaningful.

That’s why the AP will only say a candidate is leading if that candidate is ahead by more than twice the margin of error.

When you’re looking at a subgroup, rather than a national sample, the potential error is even larger. The fewer people interviewed, the larger the margin of error. This means that state-level polls or polls that measure the views of a subgroup such as women, men, Hispanic Americans or Black Americans are subject to even more error than a national finding.

The margin of sampling error is not the only source of survey error. It is simply the only one that can be quantified using established statistical methods. But there are other factors, too. The wording and order of questions can affect how people answer. An interviewer’s skill can have an effect. Even in high-quality polls, some respondents may be less likely to answer, which means their views can be underrepresented.

What to know about the 2024 Election

1. Today’s news: Follow live updates from the campaign trail from the AP.
2. Elections, explained: We answer your election questions.

Trump Wants The Presidential Winner To Be Declared On Election Night. Why That’s Unlikely

Former President Donald Trump is stepping up his demands that the winner of the presidential race be declared shortly after polls close Tuesday, well before all the votes are counted.

Trump set the pattern in 2020, when he declared that he had won during the early morning hours after Election Day. That led his allies to demand that officials “stop the count!” He and many other conservatives have spent the past four years falsely claiming that fraud cost him that election and bemoaning how long it takes to count ballots in the U.S.

But one of many reasons we are unlikely to know the winner quickly on election night is that Republican lawmakers in two key swing states have refused to change laws that delay the count. Another is that most indications are this will be a very close election, and it takes longer to determine who won close elections than blowouts.

In the end, election experts note, the priority in vote-counting is to make sure it’s an accurate and secure tally, not to end the suspense moments after polls close.

“There’s nothing nefarious about it,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The time delay is to protect the integrity of the process.”

Trump’s demand also doesn’t seem to account for the six time zones from the East Coast to Hawaii.

David Becker, an elections expert and co-author of “The Big Truth,” debunking Trump’s 2020 election lies, said it’s not realistic for election officials in thousands of jurisdictions to “instantly snap their fingers and count 160 million multi-page ballots with dozens of races on them.”

Trump wants the race decided Tuesday night

During a Sunday rally in Pennsylvania, Trump demanded that the race be decided soon after some polls begin closing.

“They have to be decided by 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock on Tuesday night,” Trump said. “Bunch of crooked people. These are crooked people.”

It was not clear who he was targeting with the “crooked people” remark.

Timing is one example of why Trump’s demands don’t match the reality of conducting elections in the U.S. By 11 p.m. Eastern time, polls will just be closing in the two Western swing states of Arizona and Nevada.

Trump has led conservatives to bemoan that the U.S. doesn’t count elections as swiftly as France or Argentina, where results for recent races have been announced within hours of polls closing. But that’s because those countries tabulate only a single election at a time. The decentralized U.S. system prevents the federal government from controlling elections.

Instead, votes are counted in nearly 10,000 separate jurisdictions, each of which has its own races for the state legislature, city council, school boards and ballot measures to tabulate at the same time. That’s why it takes longer for the U.S. to count votes.

Declaring a winner can take time

The Associated Press calls races when there is no possibility that the trailing candidate can make up the gap. Sometimes, if one candidate is significantly behind, a winner can be called quickly. But if the margin is narrow, then every last vote could matter. It takes a while before every vote is counted even in the most efficient jurisdictions in the country.

In 2018, for example, Republican Rick Scott won the U.S. Senate race in Florida, a state conservatives regularly praise for its quick tally. But the AP didn’t call Scott’s victory until after the conclusion of a recount on Nov. 20 because Scott’s margin was so slim.

It also takes time to count every one of the millions of votes because election officials have to process disputed, or “provisional,” ballots, and to see if they were legitimately cast. Overseas ballots from military members or other U.S. citizens abroad can trickle in at the last minute. Mail ballots usually land early, but there’s a lengthy process to make sure they’re not cast fraudulently. If that process doesn’t start before Election Day, it can back up the count.

Some states, such as Arizona, also give voters whose mail ballots were rejected because the signatures didn’t match up to five days to prove they actually cast the ballot. That means final numbers simply cannot be available Tuesday night.

Election rules are to blame in some states

Some of the sluggishness is due to state-specific election rules. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two of the most important swing states, election officials for years have pleaded with Republican lawmakers to change the law that prevents them from processing their mail ballots before Election Day. That means mail ballots get tallied late, and frequently the results don’t start to get reported until after Election Day.

Democrats have traditionally dominated mail voting, which has made it seem like Republicans are in the lead until the early hours of the next morning, when Democratic mail votes finally get added to the tally. Experts even have names for this from past elections — the “red mirage” or the “blue shift.” Trump exploited that dynamic in 2020 when he had his supporters demand an abrupt end to vote counts — the ballots that remained untallied were largely mail ones that were for Joe Biden. It’s not clear how that will play out this year, since Republicans have shifted and voted in big numbers during early voting.

Michigan used to have similar restrictions, but after Democrats won control of the state Legislature in 2022 they removed the prohibition on early processing of mail ballots. That state’s Democratic Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, said she hopes to have most results available by Wednesday.

“At the end of the day, chief election officials are the folks who have the ability to provide those accurate results. Americans should focus on what they say and not what any specific candidate or folks who are part of the campaign say,” said Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Trump allies urge him to declare victory swiftly

Some of Trump’s allies say he should be even more aggressive about declaring victory this time around.

Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon, who in 2020 predicted the then-president would declare victory before the race was called, advocated for a similar strategy during a recent press conference after he was released from federal prison, where he was serving time for a contempt of Congress conviction related to the investigation into Trump’s effort to overturn his loss in 2020.

“President Trump came up at 2:30 in the morning and talked,” Bannon said. “He should have done it at 11 o’clock in 2020.”

Other Trump supporters have taken a darker tone. His former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, suggested during a recent interview on the right-wing American Truth Project podcast that violence could erupt in states still counting ballots the day after Election Day because people “are just not going to put up with it.”

Trying to project a sense of inevitability about a Trump win, the former president and his supporters have been touting early vote data and favorable polls to contend the election is all but over. Republicans have returned to voting early after largely staying away at Trump’s direction in 2020 and 2022. In some swing states that track party registration, registered Republicans are outvoting Democrats in early voting.

But that doesn’t mean Republicans are ahead in any meaningful sense. Early voting data does not tell you who will win an election because it only records who voted, not how they voted.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has been explicitly targeting Republicans disillusioned by Trump. In each of those states where more Republicans have voted, there also are huge numbers of voters casting early ballots who are not registered with either of the two major political parties. If Harris won just a tiny fraction more of those votes than Trump, it would erase the small leads Republicans have.

There’s only one way to find out who won the presidential election: Wait until enough votes are tallied, whenever that is.

What Is The Electoral College And How Does The U.S. Use It To Elect Presidents?

Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 because of the Electoral College. So did George W. Bush in 2000.

The Electoral College is the unique American system of electing presidents. It is different from the popular vote, and it has an outsize impact on how candidates run and win campaigns. Republicans Trump and Bush lost the popular vote during their presidential runs but won the Electoral College to claim the nation’s top office.

Some Democrats charge that the system favors Republicans and they would rather the United States elect presidents by a simple majority vote. But the country’s framers set up the system in the Constitution, and it would require a constitutional amendment to change.

A look at the Electoral College and how it works, as Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, compete for the White House on Election Day, Nov. 5:

What is the Electoral College?

The Electoral College is a 538-member body that elects a president. The framers of the Constitution set it up to give more power to the states and as a compromise to avoid having Congress decide the winner.

Each state’s electors vote for the candidate who won the popular vote in that state. The runner-up gets nothing — except in Nebraska and Maine where elector votes are awarded based on congressional district and statewide results.

To win the presidency, a candidate must secure 270 electoral votes — a majority of the 538 possible votes.

Who are the electors?

Electors are allocated based on how many representatives a state has in the House of Representatives, plus its two senators. The District of Columbia gets three, despite the fact that the home to Congress has no vote in Congress.

It varies by state, but often the electors are picked by state parties. Members of Congress cannot serve as electors.

How and when are the votes counted?

After state election officials certify their elections, electors meet in their individual states — never as one body — to certify the election. This year, that will happen on Dec. 17.

If the two candidates have a tied number of votes, the election is thrown to the House, where each state’s congressional delegation gets one vote. That has happened only twice, in 1801 and 1825.

Once a state’s electors have certified the vote, they send a certificate to Congress. Congress then formally counts and certifies the vote at a special session on Jan. 6. The vice president presides as the envelopes for each state are opened and verified.

How is it different from the popular vote?

Under the Electoral College system, more weight is given to a single vote in a small state than to the vote of someone in a large state, leading to outcomes at times that have been at odds with the popular vote.

It also affects how candidates campaign. Because the outcome is almost certain in solidly Republican states and solidly Democratic states, candidates tend to focus most of their efforts on a handful of swing states that have split their votes in recent elections.

Can lawmakers object?

Lawmakers can object to a state’s results during the congressional certification, as several Republicans did after the 2020 election. On Jan. 6, 2021, the House and Senate both voted to reject GOP objections to the Arizona and Pennsylvania results.

After Trump tried to overturn his defeat to Democrat Joe Biden and his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, Congress updated the 1800s-era Electoral Count Act to make it harder to object and to more clearly lay out the vice president’s ceremonial role, among other changes. Trump had pressured Vice President Mike Pence to try and object to the results — something the vice president has no legal standing to do.

Once Congress certifies the vote, the new or returning president will be inaugurated Jan. 20 on the steps of the Capitol.

Here’s What To Watch As Election Day Approaches In The U.S.

Election Day is nearly upon us. In a matter of hours, the final votes in the 2024 presidential election will be cast.

In a deeply divided nation, the election is a true toss-up between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump.

We know there are seven battleground states that will decide the outcome, barring a major surprise. But major questions persist about the timing of the results, the makeup of the electorate, the influx of misinformation — even the possibility of political violence. At the same time, both sides are prepared for a protracted legal battle that could complicate things further.

Here’s what to watch on the eve of Election Day 2024:

History will be made either way

Given all the twists and turns in recent months, it’s easy to overlook the historical significance of this election.

Harris would become the first female president in the United States’ 248-year history. She would also be the first Black woman and person of South Asian descent to hold the office. Harris and her campaign have largely played down gender and race fearing that they might alienate some supporters. But the significance of a Harris win would not be lost on historians.

A Trump victory would represent a different kind of historical accomplishment. He would become the first person convicted of a felony elected to the U.S. presidency, having been convicted of 34 felony counts in a New York hush-money case little more than five months ago.

Trump, who is still facing felony charges in at least two separate criminal cases, argued that he is the victim of a politicized justice system. And tens of millions of voters apparently believe him — or they’re willing to overlook his extraordinary legal baggage.

How long will it take to know the winner?

Election Day in the United States is now often considered election week as each state follows its own rules and practices for counting ballots — not to mention the legal challenges — that can delay the results. But the truth is, nobody knows how long it will take for the winner to be announced this time.

In 2020, The Associated Press declared President Joe Biden the winner on Saturday afternoon — four days after polls closed. But even then, The AP called North Carolina for Trump 10 days after Election Day and Georgia for Biden 16 days later after hand recounts.

Four years earlier, the 2016 election was decided just hours after most polls closed. The AP declared Trump the winner on election night at 2:29 a.m. (it was technically Wednesday morning on the East Coast).

This time, both campaigns believe the race is extremely close across the seven swing states that are expected to decide the election, barring a major surprise: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The size of the map and the tightness of the race make it hard to predict when a winner could be declared.

Where can I find early clues about how the contest might unfold?

Look to two East Coast battleground states, North Carolina and Georgia, where the results could come in relatively quickly. That doesn’t mean we’ll get the final results in those states quickly if the returns are close, but they are the first swing states that might offer a sense of what kind of night we’re in for.

To go deeper, look to urban and suburban areas in the industrial North and Southeast, where Democrats have made gains since 2020.

In North Carolina, Harris’ margins in Wake and Mecklenburg Counties, home to the state capital of Raleigh and the state’s largest city, Charlotte, respectively, will reveal how much Trump will need to squeeze out of the less-populated rural areas he has dominated.

In Pennsylvania, Harris needs heavy turnout in deep blue Philadelphia, but she’s also looking to boost the Democrats’ advantage in the arc of suburban counties to the north and west of the city. She has campaigned aggressively in Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties, where Biden improved on Clinton’s 2016 winning margins. The Philadelphia metro area, including the four collar counties, accounts for 43 percent of Pennsylvania’s vote.

Elsewhere in the Blue Wall, Trump needs to blunt Democratic growth in Michigan’s key suburban counties outside of Detroit, especially Oakland County. He faces the same challenge in Wisconsin’s Waukesha County outside of Milwaukee.

Where are the candidates?

Trump will likely spend the very early hours of Election Day in Michigan, where he is scheduled to hold a final late-night rally in Grand Rapids as has become his tradition.

The Republican candidate plans to spend the rest of the day in Florida, where he is expected to vote in person -- despite previously saying he would vote early. He’s scheduled to hold a campaign watch party in Palm Beach Tuesday night.

Harris plans to attend an Election Night party at Howard University in Washington, a historically Black university where she graduated with a degree in economics and political science in 1986 and was an active member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

Aside from Howard, she has no public schedule announced for Election Day.

Harris said Sunday that she had “just filled out” her mail-in ballot and it was “on its way to California.”

Who’s left to show up on Election Day?

On the eve of Election Day, it’s unclear which voters will show up to cast ballots on Tuesday.

More than 77 million people participated in early voting — either in person or through the mail. So many people already cast ballots that some officials say the polls in states like Georgia might be a “ghost town” on Election Day.

One major reason for the surge is that that Trump has generally encouraged his supporters to vote early this time, a reversal from 2020 when he called on Republicans to vote only in-person on Election Day. The early vote numbers confirm that millions of Republicans have heeded Trump’s call in recent weeks.

The key question, however, is whether the surge of Republicans who voted early this time will ultimately cannibalize the number of Republicans who show up on Tuesday.

There are also shifts on the Democratic side. Four years ago, as the pandemic lingered, Democrats overwhelmingly cast their ballots early. But this time around, without the public health risk, it’s likely that more Democrats will show up in person on Election Day.

That balance on both sides is critical as we try to understand the early returns. And it’s on the campaigns to know which voters they still need to turn out on Tuesday. On that front, Democrats may have an advantage.

Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee have outsourced much of their get-out-the-vote operation operation to outside groups, including one funded largely by billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk that’s facing new questions about its practices. Harris’ campaign, by contrast, is running a more traditional operation that features more than 2,500 paid staffers and 357 offices in battleground states alone.

Could there be unrest?

Trump has been aggressively promoting baseless claims in recent days questioning the integrity of the election. He falsely insists that he can lose only if Democrats cheat, even as polls show that show the race is a true toss-up.

Trump could again claim victory on election night regardless of the results, just as he did in 2020.

Such rhetoric can have serious consequences as the nation saw when Trump loyalists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 in one of the darkest days in modern American history. And unfortunately, there is still a potential of further violence this election season.

The Republican National Committee will have thousands of “election integrity” poll monitors in place on Tuesday searching for any signs of fraud, which critics fear could lead to harassment of voters or election workers. In some key voting places, officials have requested the presence of sheriff deputies in addition to bulletproof glass and panic buttons that connect poll managers to a local 911 dispatcher.

At the same time, Trump allies note that he has faced two assassination attempts in recent months that raise the possibility of further threats against him. And police in Washington and other cities are preparing for the possibility of serious Election Day unrest.

As always, it’s worth noting that a broad coalition of top government and industry officials, many of them Republicans, found that the 2020 election was the “most secure” in American history.”

Harris And Trump Offer Worlds-apart Contrasts On Top Issues In Presidential Race

Voters in this year’s presidential election are choosing between two conflicting visions of the United States offered by Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump. The outcome will affect how the country sees itself and how it’s viewed across the world, with repercussions that could echo for decades.

Since replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, Harris has pledged to blaze her own path forward. But many of the vice president’s ideas are well trod by Biden: middle-class tax cuts, tax increases on the wealthy and corporations, a restoration of abortion rights, a government that aggressively addresses climate change. and a commitment to uphold democratic values and the rule of law.

Trump has pledged retaliation against rivals as he pushes to fulfill an agenda sidetracked during his previous term by the global pandemic. The former president wants to undertake a mass deportation of migrants who are living in the United States illegally, extend and expand his 2017 tax cuts, greatly increase tariffs and offer more support for fossil fuels and less support for renewable energy. He has attacked transgender rights and pledged to end Russia’s war with Ukraine while suggesting Ukraine must make territorial concessions. He also is seeking to concentrate more government power within the White House.

The candidates have spelled out their ideas in speeches, advertisements and other venues. Both say that their approach would do more to lift up workers, the middle class and the promises that have defined America. While Trump and Harris agree on not taxing workers’ tips, the similarities largely stop there — a further sign of how the election’s outcome could reshape the country.

A look at where each candidate stands on 10 top issues:

Abortion

HARRIS: She has called on Congress to pass legislation guaranteeing abortion access in federal law, a right that stood for nearly 50 years before being overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022. She has campaigned on how the patchwork of state laws limiting abortion have hurt women’s access to medical care, in one prominent case leading to the death in Georgia of Amber Nicole Thurman.

Harris has promoted the administration’s efforts short of federal law, including steps to protect women who travel to access the procedure and limit how law enforcement collects medical records. Her argument to the public is rooted in the concept of freedom, saying “the freedom to make decisions about one’s own body should not be made by the government.”

TRUMP: He often brags about nominating the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. After dodging questions about when in pregnancy he believed abortion should be restricted, Trump announced last spring that decisions on access and cutoffs should be left to the states. He has praised the patchwork of restrictions that have emerged across Republican-led states, saying the people are deciding.

He has said he would not sign a national abortion ban into law and would not try to block access to abortion medication, after initially waffling. He told Time magazine that it should also be left up to states to determine whether to prosecute women for abortions or to monitor their pregnancies, but he has not rejected the idea outright. He has said that, if he wins, he wants to make in vitro fertilization treatment free for women. He has even claimed that he is the “father” of the treatment, first used in 1978, even though it has only come under threat because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Climate and energy

HARRIS: She has done something of an about-face, saying in her campaign that it’s possible to continue hydraulic fracturing for fossil fuels even as she embraces policies that favor renewable energy resources. Republicans are quick to point out that Harris opposed offshore drilling and fracking during her short-lived campaign for the 2020 presidential nomination.

As a senator from California, Harris was an early sponsor of the Green New Deal, a sweeping series of proposals meant to swiftly move the U.S. to fully green energy. It was a plan championed by the Democratic Party’s most progressive wing. But during her tenure as vice president, Harris has adopted more moderate positions, focusing on implementing the climate provisions of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. That provided nearly $375 billion for things such as financial incentives for electric cars and clean energy projects.

The Biden administration has also enlisted more than 20,000 young people in a national Climate Corps, a Peace Corps-like program to promote conservation through projects such as weatherizing homes and repairing wetlands. Despite that, it’s unlikely that the U.S. will be on track to meet Biden’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.

TRUMP: His mantra for one of his top policy priorities: “DRILL, BABY, DRILL.” Trump, who in the past said climate change was a “hoax” and harbors a particular disdain for wind power, says it’s his goal for the U.S. to have the cheapest energy and electricity in the world. He has claimed he will cut prices in half within a year of his potential return to office. While he often criticizes the Biden administration for its policies, domestic oil production has already been at near-record highs since late 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Trump wants to push that higher by increasing oil drilling on public lands, offering tax breaks to oil, gas and coal producers, speeding the approval of natural gas pipelines, opening dozens of new power plants, including nuclear facilities, and rolling back the Biden administration’s aggressive efforts to get people to switch to electric cars, which he argues have a place but shouldn’t be forced on consumers. He has also pledged to re-exit the Paris climate agreement, end wind subsidies and eliminate regulations imposed and proposed by the Biden administration targeting energy-inefficient kinds of lightbulbs, stoves, dishwashers and shower heads.

Democracy and the rule of law

HARRIS: Like Biden, Harris has decried Trump as a threat to the nation’s democracy. She has agreed with former Trump administration officials who labeled him a “fascist.”

Harris has leaned more heavily into her personal background as a prosecutor and contrasted that with Trump being found guilty of 34 felony counts in a New York hush money case and being found liable for fraudulent business practices and sexual abuse in civil court. Harris initially talked less frequently than Biden did about Trump’s denial of his 2020 loss and his incitement of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. But in the closing weeks of the 2024 campaign, she increasingly has framed the prospect of another Trump term as “dangerous.”

TRUMP: After refusing to accept that Biden won, Trump hasn’t committed to accepting the 2024 results. He’s repeatedly promised to pardon the Jan. 6 defendants jailed for assaulting police officers and other crimes during the attack on the Capitol, and recently threatened to jail lawyers, election officials, donors and others “involved in unscrupulous behavior” surrounding November’s vote. He has lashed out at media organizations, threatening their broadcast licenses in response to debate questions and coverage he’s deemed unfair.

Trump has called his Democratic rivals the “enemy within” who are “more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.” He pledges to overhaul the Justice Department and FBI “from the ground up,” aggrieved by the criminal charges the department has brought against him. He promises to deploy the National Guard to cities such as Chicago that are struggling with violent crime and in response to protests, and has also pledged to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Biden.

Federal government

HARRIS: Like Biden, Harris has campaigned hard against “Project 2025" — a plan that Trump has denounced but that was written by leading conservatives and many of his former administration officials.

The plan lays out how to move as swiftly as possible to dramatically remake the federal government and push it to the right if Trump wins the White House. She is also part of an administration that is taking steps to make it harder for any mass firings of civil servants to happen. In April, the Office of Personnel Management issued a new rule that would ban federal workers from being reclassified as political appointees or other at-will employees, thus making them easier to dismiss. That was in response to Schedule F, a 2020 executive order from Trump that reclassified tens of thousands of federal workers to make firing them easier.

TRUMP: The former president has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, despite his close ties to many of its key architects. He has nonetheless pledged to undertake his own overhaul of the federal bureaucracy, which he has long blamed for blocking his first-term agenda, saying: “I will totally obliterate the deep state.” He plans to reissue the Schedule F order stripping civil service protections. He says he would then act to fire “rogue bureaucrats,” including those who ”weaponized our justice system,” and the “warmongers and America-Last globalists in the Deep State, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the national security industrial complex.”

Trump has pledged to terminate the Education Department and wants to curtail the independence of regulatory agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission. As part of his effort to cut government waste and red tape, he has promised to eliminate at least 10 federal regulations for every new one imposed.

Immigration

HARRIS: Trying to defuse GOP criticism, Harris has said she would sign into law a bipartisan Senate compromise killed by Republican lawmakers at Trump’s request. It would have toughened asylum standards and meant more border agents, immigration judges and asylum officers. She said she would bring back that bill and sign it, saying that Trump “talks the talk, but doesn’t walk the walk” on immigration.

Harris likes to talk up her experience as California attorney general, saying she walked drug smuggler tunnels and successfully prosecuted gangs that moved narcotics and people across the U.S.-Mexico border. Early in his term, Biden made Harris his administration’s point person on the root causes of migration. Trump and top Republicans now blame Harris for a situation at that border, which they say is out of control due to policies that were too lenient. Harris has endorsed a comprehensive immigration overhaul, seeking paths to citizenship for immigrants in the U.S. without legal status, with a faster track for young immigrants living in the country illegally who arrived as children.

TRUMP: He has returned to the harsh immigration rhetoric that marked his previous campaigns. He promises to mount the largest domestic deportation in U.S. history, an operation that could involve detention camps and the National Guard. He would bring back policies he put in place during his first term, like the Remain in Mexico program and Title 42, which placed curbs on migrants on public health grounds. He has called for the death penalty for any migrant who kills a U.S. citizen.

Trump would revive and expand the travel ban that originally targeted citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries. After the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel, Trump pledged new “ideological screening” for immigrants to bar “dangerous lunatics, haters, bigots, and maniacs.” He would try to deport people who are in the U.S. legally but harbor “jihadist sympathies.” He would seek to end birthright citizenship for people born in the U.S. whose parents are both in the country illegally.

Israel and Gaza

HARRIS: Harris says Israel has a right to defend itself, and she’s repeatedly decried Hamas as a terrorist organization. But the vice president might have helped defuse some backlash from progressives by being more vocal about the need to better protect civilians during fighting in Gaza.

More than 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war in Gaza, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and militants in its count, but says that women and children make up just over half of the dead. Israel says it has killed more than 17,000 militants in the war.

Like Biden, Harris supports a proposed hostage-for-extended cease-fire deal that aims to bring all remaining hostages and Israeli dead home. Biden and Harris say the deal could lead to a permanent end to the war and they have endorsed a two-state solution, which would have Israel existing alongside an independent Palestinian state. But Biden is also confronting the prospect of a widening conflict in Lebanon and attacks by Iran even as they both see Israel’s recent killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as a reason for a cease-fire to be more likely.

TRUMP: He has expressed support for Israel’s efforts to “destroy” Hamas, but he’s also been critical of some of Israel’s tactics. He says the country must finish the job quickly and get back to peace. He has called for more aggressive responses to pro-Palestinian protests at college campuses and applauded police efforts to clear encampments. Trump also proposes to revoke the student visas of those who espouse antisemitic or anti-American views and deport those who support Hamas.

LGBTQ+ issues

HARRIS: During her rallies, Harris accuses Trump and his party of seeking to roll back a long list of freedoms, including the ability “to love who you love openly and with pride.” She leads audiences in chants of “We’re not going back.”

While her campaign has yet to produce specifics on its plans, she has been part of a Biden administration that regularly denounces discrimination and attacks against the LGBTQ+ community. Early in Biden’s term, his administration reversed an executive order from Trump that had largely banned transgender people from military service. His Education Department issued a rule that says Title IX, the 1972 law protecting women’s rights, also bars discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. That rule was silent on the issue of transgender athletes.

TRUMP: He has pledged to keep transgender women out of women’s sports and says he will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that “only two genders,” as determined at birth, are recognized by the United States. He promises to “defeat the toxic poison of gender ideology.”

As part of his crackdown on gender-affirming care, he would declare that any health care provider participating in the “chemical or physical mutilation of minor youth” no longer meets federal health and safety standards and is barred from receiving federal money. He would take similarly punitive steps in schools against any teacher or school official who “suggests to a child that they could be trapped in the wrong body.”

Trump would support a national prohibition of hormonal or surgical intervention for transgender minors and bar transgender people from military service.

NATO and Ukraine

HARRIS: The vice president has yet to specify how her positions on Russia’s war with Ukraine might differ from Biden’s, other than to praise his efforts to rebuild alliances unraveled by Trump, particularly NATO, the military alliance that is a critical bulwark against Russian aggression.

The Biden administration has pledged unceasing support for Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. Washington has sent tens of billions of dollars in military and other aid to Ukraine, including $61 billion in weapons, ammunition and other assistance that is expected to last through the end of this year. The government has also reached an agreement with allies to provide Ukraine with a $50 billion loan — with $20 billion from the United States — that would be backed by frozen Russian financial assets.

The administration has maintained that continuing U.S. assistance is critical because Russian leader Vladimir Putin will not stop at invading Ukraine. Harris has said previously that it would be foolish to risk global alliances the U.S. has established and decried Putin’s “brutality."

TRUMP: The former president has repeatedly taken issue with U.S. aid to Ukraine and says he will continue to “fundamentally reevaluate” the mission and purpose of the NATO alliance if he returns to office. He has claimed, without explanation, that he will be able to end the war before his inauguration by bringing both sides to the negotiating table. (His approach seems to hinge on Ukraine giving up at least some of its Russian-occupied territory in exchange for a cease-fire.)

On NATO, he has assailed member nations for years for failing to meet agreed-upon military spending targets. Trump drew alarms this year when he said that, as president, he had warned leaders that he would not only refuse to defend nations that don’t hit those targets, but that he also “would encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to countries that are “delinquent.”

Tariffs and trade

HARRIS: The Biden-Harris administration has tried to boost trade with allies in Europe, Asia and North America, while using tariffs and other targeted tools to go after rivals such as China. The Democratic administration kept Trump’s tariffs on China in place, while adding a ban on exporting advanced computer chips to that country and providing incentives to boost U.S. industries.

In May, the administration specifically targeted China with increased tariffs on electric vehicles and steel and aluminum, among other products.

TRUMP: He wants a dramatic expansion of tariffs on nearly all imported foreign goods, saying that “we’re going to have 10% to 20% tariffs on foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years.” He has suggested tariffs of 100% or more on Chinese goods. He treats these taxes as a way to fund other tax cuts, lower the deficit and possibly fund child care — though economists say the tariffs could raise prices for consumers without generating the revenues Trump promises.

Trump would urge Congress to pass legislation giving the president authority to impose a reciprocal tariff on any country that imposes one on the U.S. Much of his trade agenda has focused on China. Trump has proposed phasing out Chinese imports of essential goods including electronics, steel and pharmaceuticals and wants to ban Chinese companies from owning U.S. infrastructure in sectors such as energy, technology and farmland.

Taxes

HARRIS: With much of the 2017 tax overhaul expiring at end of next year, Harris is pledging tax cuts for more than 100 million working and middle class households. In addition to preserving some of the expiring cuts, she wants to make permanent a tax credit of as much as $3,600 per child and offer a special $6,000 tax credit for new parents.

Harris says her administration would expand tax credits for first-time homebuyers and would push to build 3 million new housing units in four years, while wiping out taxes on tips and endorsing tax breaks for entrepreneurs. Like Biden, she wants to raise the corporate tax rate to 28% and the corporate minimum tax to 21%. The current corporate rate is 21% and the corporate minimum, raised under the Inflation Reduction Act, is at 15% for companies making more than $1 billion a year. But Harris would not increase the capital gains tax as much as Biden had proposed on investors with more than $1 million in income.

TRUMP: Trump has promised a slew of new tax cuts aimed at groups he has been trying to win over this election, including eliminating taxes on tips received by workers — a policy later embraced by Harris, who would also raise the minimum wage for tipped workers. Trump wants to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits and taxes on overtime pay, and has pledged to make interest on car loans tax-deductible like mortgage payments -– but only for cars built in the U.S.

The former president has promised to extend and even expand all of the 2017 tax cuts that he signed into law, while also paying down the debt. He has proposed cutting the overall corporate tax rate to 15% from 21%, but only for companies that make their products in the U.S. He would repeal any tax increases signed into law by Biden. He also aims to gut some of the tax breaks that Biden put into law to encourage the development of renewable energy and EVs.

He wants to lower the cost of housing by opening up federal land to development. Outside analyses suggest that Trump’s ideas would do much more to increase budget deficits than what Harris would do, without delivering the growth needed to minimize any additional debt.