Donald Trump, Kamala Harris Virtually Tied In Battleground States, Polls Say: Latest Updates

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are running out of time to convince voters they’re the best candidate to vote for in the 2024 presidential election.
Harris and Trump have been neck and neck in polls in recent weeks. The two and their running mates, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), have ramped up their public appearances in the final days of the campaign, barnstorming battleground states and taking part in media blitzes.
Abortion rights, inflation, extremism, immigration and more — the stakes have never been higher. Catch up on critical 2024 election updates here.
Candidates up and down the ballot are making their final pitches. Control of the House and Senate is at stake, and state and local politicians around the nation are making eleventh-hour arguments for a win.
Read the latest updates on the election below.
Harris will spend the final day of the 2024 campaign in Pennsylvania, the swing state with the highest number of Electoral College votes. After joining a canvass kickoff in Scranton, the vice president will headline a rally in Allentown. Harris will then deliver remarks in Pittsburgh, where she will be joined by artists D-Nice, Katy Perry and Andra Day. She will hold her final rally before Election Day in Philadelphia, where Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin and Oprah Winfrey are among the guests expected to appear.
Walz will host a meet and greet in St. Paul, Minnesota, before traveling to Wisconsin to hold campaign events in La Crosse, Stevens Point and Milwaukee. He will then head to Michigan, where he is scheduled to speak at a Detroit rally.
Trump is due to travel to three battleground states: North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan. The former president will start the day at a rally in Raleigh before holding two other events in Reading and Pittsburgh. Trump will close the day with a rally in Grand Rapids, the city where he close to deliver the closing message of his campaign in his past two presidential runs.
Vance will headline a rally in La Crosse, Wisconsin, before traveling to Michigan for another event in Flint. Later, he will deliver remarks at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, before making his final appearance of the day in Newtown, Pennsylvania.
Trump thinks he can tame the southern border with an “innovative” new tool: tariffs.
He told the audience he’s “going to immediately impose a 25% tariff on everything [Mexico] sends into the United States,” and congratulated the crowd on being “the first I’ve told that to.”
Trump predicted the economic tool, which in fact imposes higher costs on Americans, has “a 100% chance of working.”
“If it doesn’t work, I’ll make [the tariff] 50,” he continued. “And if that doesn’t work I’ll make it 75. I’ll make it 100. There’s a one hundred percent chance it will work.”
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy last week found that Trump’s numerous tariff proposals would increase taxes on 95% of Americans and would outweigh his tax cuts for all but the richest households.
Before launching into his stump speech at his last rally in North Carolina, Trump (without evidence) told the crowd he’s “leading every swing state” and “we’re way leading, all we have to do is close it up.”
“We’re leading every swing state which is unheard of for the Republican party,” he reiterated.
It’s unclear where Trump’s getting his data, but polling averages show the race is actually a toss-up in most swing states.
At the Trump campaign’s last official rally in North Carolina, Trump Jr. asked the crowd if they’re “ready to stop the insanity.”
He then warned them not to “fall for the psy-ops” in the final days leading up to the election, asserting without any evidence that polls showing his dad winning are designed to make people complacent and not vote, while polls that show Trump losing are “designed to make you over-confident so you stay home.”
“We can end it tomorrow,” he said, while alleging that dark, anti-Democratic forces want to drag out the election for a week “to find a magical truck full of ballots.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. urged his supporters to vote for Trump despite his name appearing on the ballot in several states, including in the key battlegrounds of Michigan and Wisconsin.
“No matter what state you live in you should be voting for Donald Trump,” he said in a video posted on X, formerly Twitter. “That’s the only way that we can get me and everything I stand for into Washington, D.C., and fulfill the mission that motivated my campaign.”
Kennedy, a prominent vaccine skeptic who became a top campaign surrogate for Trump after ending his Independent presidential bid, on Sunday told Fox News the GOP nominee has “assured” him he will get a role in the White House if Trump wins.
“I’m confident that if I wanted to do [Health and Human Services] secretary, the president would fight like hell to make that happen,” Kennedy said.
The pollster who shocked the political world this weekend by suggesting Harris is now narrowly ahead of Trump in Iowa has explained why she thinks the Democratic candidate has seen a big upswing in the state.The poll — conducted by J. Ann Selzer, sponsored by the Des Moines Register, and published Saturday — puts Harris at 47% over Trump’s 44%.While the Harris lead in the Selzer poll is an outlier based on rival surveys that give the GOP nominee the advantage, Selzer is viewed as one of America’s premier pollsters, based largely on her accuracy in predicting the outcome of previous presidential races in the Hawkeye State.The Iowa poll was seized upon as an indicator of the direction other Midwestern states are heading, particularly the battlegrounds that will decide the election.During a media round in recent days, Selzer spoke to MSNBC‘s “The Weekend” on Sunday and explained why she believed Harris had leapfrogged Trump.“We don’t have as much data as we might like about why this is happening,” she said. “But our consensus from the reporters who work this beat is that the six-week abortion ban went into effect this past summer … and so I think as Iowans see the consequences of that. I think it has gotten people interested in voting.”She characterized the Dobbs decision as being the big motivating factor as there have been no presidential visits to the state, with Iowa “largely written off” as a win for the third time for Trump, so any voting shifts were “largely organic.”Watch the full interview below:
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) warned that extreme Republicans will put popular programs, including the Affordable Care Act, in jeopardy if they retain control of the House following the election.
“The extreme MAGA Republicans have clearly and unequivocally articulated what they will do to America moving forward. The extreme MAGA Republicans will take a blow torch to social security, they will take a blow torch to Medicare, they will take a blow torch to the Affordable Care Act,” Jeffries told ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “House Democrats will take a blow torch to Project 2025.”
Jeffries also drew a contrast between his party and the GOP, noting that Democrats believe in free and fair elections.
“The majority of current House Republicans voted not to certify the election in 2020, and so it’s certainly a challenge, and my colleagues on the other side of the aisle don’t seem to be capable of unequivocally saying that they will certify the election and the verdict that is rendered by the American people. As House Democrats that’s what we will do.”
“We believe in democracy even when we disagree with the outcome,” he continued.
The New York Times Tech Guild walked off the job early Monday after stalled talks, potentially jeopardizing the news outlet’s busy Election Day news coverage.
The guild, which represents more than 600 software developers and others who run the site’s back-end systems according to the Times, called it quits after negotiations hit a wall late Sunday.
Some of the issues both sides clashed on were remote/hybrid work protections, and pay equity/fair pay, the union said.
“The Tech Guild is asking readers to honor the digital picket line and not play popular NYT Games such as Wordle and Connections as well as not use the NYT Cooking app,” the union said in a statement.
The union said its members would protest daily outside the company’s headquarters starting at 9 a.m. Monday.
NYT tech guild announces it walks off the job – their members help power a lot of the digital elements readers turn to daily… and especially on big moments like Election Night pic.twitter.com/9dDrvMNvwR
Research by Focaldata, a British company that uses a different polling technique, shows Vice President Kamala Harris narrowly beating Donald Trump in the presidential race, Politico reported.
The MRP — which stands for “multilevel regression and post-stratification” — poll of 31,000 voters shows Harris victories in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The research suggests that standard election pollsters may be giving the impression that Trump is stronger than he really is.
During an appearance on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) criticized President Joe Biden for apparently referring to Trump’s supporters as “garbage” last week.
The Trump ally, though, did not share similar concerns about the former president previously calling the people around Harris “scum” and “garbage.”
Read more on the interview here.
The Harris campaign welcomed the findings of the last Des Moines Register poll of Iowa which showed the Democratic candidate leading Trump by three percentage points in a state he carried twice. However, her team warned against getting overly excited about it, noting that it is merely a reflection of the energy Harris’ candidacy is generating on the ground.
“We are seeing that we’re closing strong,” a Harris official told reporters, according to Politico. “I would not read into it any more than that.”
The New York Times this weekend used just one paragraph to sum up why GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump is totally unfit to return to the White House.
Read more here:
NBC gave former President Donald Trump two minutes of free air time on Sunday night after his competitor, Vice President Kamala Harris, made a surprise appearance on “Saturday Night Live” this weekend.
The network aired a minute-long video message from Trump during NASCAR and football events.
During a call with ABC News’ Jonathan Karl on Sunday morning, Trump complained to the journalist about his reporting that the GOP candidate is not as disciplined as his team would like him to be in the final days of the campaign.
“You said my message was all over the place. It’s not,” Trump said.
Read more on their conversation here.
Abortion rights, inflation, extremism, immigration and more — the stakes have never been higher.
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