PHILADELPHIA — Vice President Kamala Harris gave her final appeal to voters in Pennsylvania with the last rally of her presidential campaign.
Harris spoke from the famous Rocky steps — “a tribute to those who start out the underdog and climb to victory” — in front of the Philadelphia Art Museum, an iconic location known for the eponymous film that represents an underdog beating the odds. Her star-studded closing rally, featuring celebrities including Lady Gaga and Oprah, capped off an extraordinary and whirlwind 106-day campaign that began in late July.
“America, it comes down to this: just one more day in the most consequential election of our lifetimes, and the momentum is on our side,” Harris told supporters. “Our crowd has tapped into the ambitions and the aspirations and the dreams of the American people.”
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At Harris’ first rally as a candidate the day after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, hordes of relieved, energized and hopeful Democrats packed into a high school gym in West Allis, Wisconsin, with makeshift merchandise and aspirations of electing the first woman president. Harris returned to Milwaukee on Friday for a get-out-the-vote rally where she was introduced by rapper Cardi B and invigorated the crowd and promised to once and for all “turn the page on an era of politics” defined by former President Donald Trump.
Harris and Trump barnstormed battleground states for a final time on Monday, making a series of stops in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan. On Monday evening, the Harris campaign produced a simulcast of rallies featuring running mate Tim Walz and other surrogates and musical performances in battleground states around the country.
Trump held rallies in Raleigh, North Carolina; Reading and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Grand Rapids, Michigan. Meanwhile, Harris made appearances across Pennsylvania, including in Scranton, Allentown, Pittsburgh and ended the night in Philadelphia. Trump won Pennsylvania, a critical battleground state, by some 40,000 votes in 2016; Biden flipped it back by 80,000 in 2020.
The Harris campaign rapidly scaled up an expansive ground game, telling reporters on a call Sunday that over 90,000 volunteers have helped knock on 3 million doors in battleground states. In her swing through Pennsylvania on Monday, Harris herself knocked on doors in Reading.
“Here’s the thing about all of us: We like hard work,” Harris said in her stump speech. “Hard work is good work. Hard work is joyful work. And make no mistake, we will win.”
The campaign did “an amazing job” reaching voters in Wisconsin, said Myra Edwards, a voter at Harris’ Milwaukee rally.
“They are penetrating in the most expert way,” she said. “It’s hard to imagine who they haven’t reached.”
Sue O’Malley-Sheehan, who had spent the weekend canvassing in the Philadelphia area, said the mood on the ground was “energetic.”
“It was reaffirming all the excitement,” she said at the Monday rally. “There was an electricity of positivity in the air.”
While Harris’ tone was celebratory and forward-looking, Trump’s message was darker, consistently chaotic and marked by often-racist and sexist, false and rambling tangents. He referred to Harris as “ incompetent,” blaming her for the state of the country in often apocalyptic terms. Trump described the United States as an “occupied” country, overrun by violent undocumented immigrants, buckling unsustainable high costs of living caused by poor leadership and on the brink of a nuclear World War III.
“Tomorrow you have to stand up and tell Kamala that you had enough, you can’t take it anymore,” Trump said in Raleigh on Monday, encouraging the audience to vote. “I mean what a terrible job — what they have done to our country. And you’re going to say that to her. You’re going to say, ‘You’ve done a terrible job, you’re grossly incompetent. We’re not going to take it anymore. Kamala, you’re fired. Get the hell out of here.’”
Harris will spend election night at her alma mater of Howard University in Washington, D.C., while Trump’s campaign will host its watch party at the Palm Beach County Convention Center, near his home at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
Harris said that from the start of her campaign, it has not been a fight against something but “a fight for something — a fight for a future with freedom, with opportunity and with dignity for all Americans.”
“We finish as we started: with optimism, with energy, with joy,” she said. “Knowing that we the people have the power to shape our future and that we can confront any challenge we face.”
