US election 2024: Donald Trump, Kamala Harris in final push for votes

Former US president Donald Trump has capped off his three-state blitz after unleashing a series of wild claims about the election. Follow live updates.

Welcome to our US election blog: Donald Trump promised a “landslide that’s too big to rig” while Kamala Harris claimed the momentum was on her side as the final polls suggested the US election would go down to the wire.

The candidates were locked on 49 per cent in the last New York Post survey, with the former president’s strength in the national vote prompting a Republican-aligned pollster to back his prediction that he would win decisively.

But a New York Times poll of the key battleground states showed the Vice President nudging ahead in North Carolina and Georgia – two must-win states for the Republican – while they were tied in Pennsylvania and Michigan, two bricks in the so-called Democratic “blue wall”.

“It’s all in line with a race that’s really and truly close to 50/50,” polling guru Nate Silver said.

Mr Trump said he expected the victor would be known on election night on Wednesday AEDT, as he bragged to his supporters in North Carolina that he was “leading by a lot”.

“We’re leading by numbers that nobody’s ever seen before,” he said.

Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said she felt “very, very good about where we are at”, with the trends among 75 million early voters “exactly as we’d like to see”.

“We are prepared if Donald Trump and his friends try to claim that they’ve won … They tried it in 2020 and it didn’t work, and it’s not going to work again,” she said.

It came as Mr Trump’s final pitch to voters took a dark turn, with the former president accusing “demonic” Democrats of “trying so hard to steal this damn thing” and attacking Americans who sat out the bitter election as “stupid”.

In an off-script rant in Pennsylvania, he also said he “shouldn’t have left” the White House four years ago and mused about reporters being shot, sending his aides into damage control.

Ms Harris spent the day trying to shore up her position in Michigan, where Arab American voters have been infuriated by the Biden administration’s handling of the war in the Middle East. She revealed she mailed in her ballot and said she backed the integrity of the system.

But Mr Trump unleashed a series of baseless claims about the election, saying it was “going bad” because of his “corrupt” opponents and “bloodsuckers” in the media, and that the US was “finished” if he lost.

“I’m the only one that talks about it, because everyone’s afraid to damn talk about it, and then they accuse you of being a conspiracy theorist,” Mr Trump said.

“The ones that should be locked up are the ones that cheat in these horrible elections that we go through in our country.”

“They cheated elections and you call them on it and they want to put you in jail.”

Ms Harris, speaking at a Detroit church, said: “In these next two days, we will be tested.”

“These days will demand everything we’ve got, but when I think about the days ahead and the God we serve, we were born for such a time,” she added.

The former president also blasted a shock poll result that had him trailing in the Republican stronghold of Iowa, saying it was “fake” and “actually should be illegal”.

At his North Carolina rally, in which he steered clear of his earlier fraud claims, Mr Trump boasted that he had “a big beautiful lead” and said: “If we let this slip away, we should have our heads examined”.

During his Pennsylvania event, where he spoke from behind bulletproof glass, Mr Trump also said that if an assassin wanted to kill him, they would “have to shoot through the fake news”.

“And I don’t mind that so much,” he quipped. His spokesman Steven Cheung offered a rare statement clarifying his comments, claiming he was “actually looking out for their welfare”.

In Michigan, Ms Harris notably did not mention her opponent by name after days of fierce attacks, instead speaking optimistically as she said she had the momentum because she was “tapping into the ambitions, the aspirations and the dreams of the American people”.

She vowed to “do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza”, amid internal concerns that Arab Americans would rebel against her because of her support for Israel.

“I have been very clear the level of death of innocent Palestinians is unconscionable. We need to end the war and we need to get the hostages out,” Ms Harris said.

Her campaign was planning a last-ditch drive for undecided voters in swing states headlined by Lady Gaga, Oprah, Katy Perry, Jon Bon Jovi, Ricky Martin and Christina Aguilera.

And a day after Ms Harris’s surprise star turn on Saturday Night Live, the senior Republican on the federal communications watchdog warned it was a “clear and blatant effort” to evade rules requiring equal airtime for candidates on licenced broadcasters.

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Originally published as US election 2024: Donald Trump, Kamala Harris in final push for votes