Democratic and Republican candidates set to blitz rallies in Pennsylvania and Michigan as polls shows race too close to call
The Guardian US has been averaging national and state polls to see how the two candidates are faring. Nationally, Kamala Harris has a one-point advantage, 48% to 47%, over Donald Trump, virtually identical to last week.
The election will be decided in the seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In these states, the polls are too close to call.
Kamala Harris pledged to “do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza” in her final rally in Michigan on Sunday, as she attempted to appeal to the state’s large Arab American and Muslim American population two days out from the election. Michigan is home to about 240,000 registered Muslim voters, a majority of whom voted for Joe Biden in 2020, helping him to a narrow victory over Donald Trump. But Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in the state have expressed dissatisfaction over the vice-president’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza.
Harris was making her fourth stop of the day in Michigan, having earlier spoken at a church in Detroit and stopped by a barber shop in Pontiac. Trump is holding his final rally of the campaign in Michigan on Monday night.
Donald Trump said he should never have left the White House after his defeat in 2020 and joked darkly he would be fine with reporters getting shot. “We had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” Trump said at a rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania. “I shouldn’t have left, I mean honestly, we did so well, we had such a great – ” he said before abruptly cutting himself off. In other comments, as he denigrated the media, he said: “To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through fake news, and I don’t mind that much, because, I don’t mind. I don’t mind.”
Donald Trump again suggested he would give a role on health policy to Robert F Kennedy Jr at a rally in Macon, Georgia. “I told a great guy, RFK Jr., Bobby — I said, ‘Bobby, you work on women’s health, you work on health, you work on what we eat. You work on pesticides. You work on everything,” he said. Kennedy, a well known vaccine sceptic, on Saturday said that the former president would push to remove fluoride from drinking water on his first day in office if elected.
Harris dodged a question on whether she voted for California’s Proposition 36, which would make it easier for prosecutors to send repeat shoplifters and drug users to jail or prison, after submitting her ballot. The measure would roll back provisions of Proposition 47, which downgraded low-level thefts and drug possession to misdemeanors.
The Trump campaign claimed that recent polling by the New York Times and the Des Moines Register is designed to suppress Trump voter turnout by presenting a bleak picture of his re-election prospects. The memo claims that the Times’s polls have biased samples and overrepresent Democratic voters compared with actual voter registration and turnout trends.
Trump also disputed a shock Iowa poll that found Kamala Harris leading the former president in the typically red state 47% to 44%. “No President has done more for farmers, and the Great State of Iowa, than Donald J. Trump,” Trump said in a post on the Truth Social network on Sunday morning. “In fact, it’s not even close! All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, by a lot”.