What to watch during the final weekend of the 2024 presidential campaign

NEW YORK (AP) – The 2024 presidential race is quickly entering its final weekend with the Democrat Kamala Harris and Republicans Donald Trump locked in a razor-thin competition.

At this late stage in the campaign, every day counts. And while few voters might change their minds this late in a typical election, there’s a sense that what’s happening in these final days could shift votes.

Harris and Trump are criss-crossing the country to rally voters in the states that matter most. They try – with varying degrees of success – to keep the focus on a clear and concise closing message. At the same time, each side is investing massive resources to increase voter turnout in the last early voting period. And in these critical days, the flow of misinformation intensifies.

Here’s what we’re seeing in the last weekend before Election Day, which is Tuesday:

Where will Harris and Trump be?

You only have to look at the candidates’ schedules this weekend to know where this election will likely be decided.

Please note that schedules can and likely will change without notice. But on Saturday, Trump is expected to make separate appearances in North Carolina, with one eyebrow-raising stop in Virginia in between.

No Democratic presidential candidate has carried North Carolina since Barack Obama in 2008, although it has been decided by less than 3 points in every election since. Trump’s decision to spend Saturday there suggests Harris has a real opportunity in the state. But Trump is also trying to convey confidence by stopping in Virginia, a state that has been safely in the Democratic column since 2008.

There is perhaps no more important swing state than Pennsylvania, where Trump is expected to campaign on Sunday. But he also has another appearance planned for North Carolina in addition to Georgia, another Southern state that has leaned Republican for nearly three decades — that is. Joe Biden passed it by less than half a percentage point four years ago.

Meanwhile, Harris is expected to campaign in North Carolina and Georgia on Saturday in a sign that her team senses real opportunity in the South. She plans to make several stops in Michigan on Sunday, switching to a Democratic-leaning state in the so-called Blue Wall, where her allies believe she is vulnerable.

Do they get notified?

Trump’s campaign management wants voters to focus on one key question as they prepare to vote, and it’s the same question he opens every rally with: Are you better off today than you were four years ago?

Harris’ team wants voters to think differently: Do they trust Trump or Harris to put the nation’s interests above their own?

Whichever candidate can more effectively keep voters focused on their closing arguments in the coming days could ultimately win the presidency. Still, both candidates have had a challenging start.

Trump opens the weekend still facing the fallout from his latest Rally in New York where a comedian described Puerto Rico as a “floating pile of garbage.” Things got tougher for Trump late Thursday after he raised the prospect of Republican rival Liz Cheney’s dead by gunshot.

It was exactly the kind of inflammatory comment his allies want him to avoid at this critical moment.

Harris’ campaign, meanwhile, is still working to shift the conversation away from President Biden’s comments earlier this week who described Trump supporters as “garbage.” Associated Press reported late Thursday that White House press officials changed the official transcript of the call in question, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity.

The spotlight of presidential politics always burns brightly. But it will perhaps burn brightest this final weekend, leaving the campaigns with virtually no margin for error. In what both sides believe is a true toss election, any missteps in the final hours could prove decisive.

How will the gender gap play out?

Trump’s graphic attack against Cheney was especially troublesome given his allies’ heightened concerns about female voters.

Polls show a significant gender gap in the contest, with Harris overall having a much better rating among women than Trump. Part of that may be the result of the GOP’s fight to limit abortion rights, which has been disastrous for Trump’s party. But Trump’s divisive leadership has also pushed women away.

Over the weekend, Trump allies, including conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk, are warning that far more women than men appear to be casting early ballots. While it’s impossible to know who they’re voting for, Kirk clearly thinks it’s bad news for Trump.

Trump is not helping his case. A day before his violent rhetoric about Cheney, the Republican former president lashed out by insisting he would protect women whether they “like it or not.”

Harris, who would be the country’s first female president, said Trump does not understand women’s rights “to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies.”

It remains to be seen whether the Democrats’ argument will be successful in this packed weekend. But Harris’ team believes there is still a significant portion of over-voters out there. And they say the undecided are disproportionately Republican-leaning suburban women.

What happens to early voting?

More than 66 million people have already voted in the 2024 election, which is more than a third of the total who voted in 2020.

They include significantly more Republicans than four years ago, largely because Trump has backed his insistence that his supporters vote in person on Election Day.

And while early in-person voting has ended in many states, there will be a big push for early voting in the final hours in at least three key states as campaigns work to gather as many votes as possible before Election Day.

That includes Michigan, where in-person early voting runs through Monday. Voters in Wisconsin can vote early in person through Sunday, though it varies by location. And in North Carolina, voters have until 15 Saturday to cast early votes in person.

The early voting period officially ended Friday in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, questions remain about the Trump campaign’s get-out-the-vote operation, which relies heavily on well-funded outside groups with little experience — including one largely funded by billionaire Elon Musk, i.e. faced with new questions about its practice.

Harris’s campaign, by contrast, runs a more traditional get-out-the-vote operation, with more than 2,500 paid staffers and 357 offices in battleground states alone.

Will misinformation intensify?

Trump’s allies appear to be intensifying baseless allegations of voter fraud, some being amplified by Trump himself. He has spent months casting doubt on the integrity of the 2024 election if he loses – just as he did four years ago.

His baseless accusations are becoming more specific in some cases as wild claims begin to surface on social media.

Earlier this weekTrump claimed on social media that York County, Pennsylvania had “received THOUSANDS of potentially FRAUDULENT voter registration forms and submitted ballots from a third-party group.” He also pointed to Lancaster County, which he claimed had been “caught with 2600 fake ballots and forms, all written by the same person. Really bad ‘stuff.’

Trump referred for investigations of potential fraud in connection with applications for voter registration. The discovery and investigation of the applications shows that the system is working as it should.

The Republican candidate has also raised baseless claims about overseas ballots and non-citizen voting and suggested, without evidence, that Harris could have access to some kind of secret insider information about election results.

Expect such claims to increase, especially on social media, in the coming days. And remember that a broad coalition of top government and industry officials, many of them Republicans, found that the 2020 election was “safest” in American history.”

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AP writers Jill Colvin and Michelle Price in New York; and Zeke Miller and Will Weissert in Washington contributed.