US election just around the corner
With only a few hours before polls close in the US election on November 5 and more than 77.6m votes already cast, preliminary results show Republican candidate Donald Trump and her Democratic rival Kamala Harris separated by less than 3 percentage points in each of the seven battleground states likely to determine Tuesday’s winner.
Polls going into election week showed a toss-up race, shifting to the possibility that the contest could prove to be a photo finish.
An NBC News poll released Sunday showed Trump and Harris tied nationally at 49 percent each. The poll found 48 percent of respondents approved of how Trump handled his presidency, compared to just 41 percent who said they approved of President Joe Biden’s time in office, a sign Harris may face some headwinds.
A New York Times/Siena College poll of battleground states published Sunday similarly showed a tight race.
In their final hours of campaigning, the two candidates were seeking to mobilize their bases and appeal to any remaining undecided voters, with Harris spending the entire day in Pennsylvania — a critical swing state that is regarded as a must-win if either candidate wants to capture the White House — and Trump hitting three battleground states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Michigan.
The two candidates have offered diverging closing messages. Trump tried to make the case that voters are not better off than they were four years ago when he left the White House and that he can “fix” the economy and the southern border. Harris pledged in Michigan to do everything in her power to “end the war in Gaza,” as she attempted to appeal to the state’s large Arab American and Muslim American population.
In an outlandish move on Monday, US authorities installed security fences in Washington D.C. as they braced for potential violent protests following the presidential election.
The Secret Service erected new 2.5-meter metal fences around the White House and Treasury Department complex, as well as Harris’s residence.
The measures come amid concerns of violence breaking out in the days after the election similar to the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by Trump’s supporters following his refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
The former US president claimed that he won the 2020 presidential election and that there was “massive” voter fraud. The attack on the Capitol led to several deaths and Trump was indicted for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in both Washington and Georgia.