By james art 
Saturday, November 2, 2024 | 6:02 in the afternoon
NEW YORK — The 2024 presidential race. enters its final weekend, with Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump facing an extremely thin race.
At this late stage of the campaign, every day counts. And while few voters change their minds this late in a typical election, there’s a sense that what happens in these final days could swing votes.
Harris and Trump are criss-crossing the country to rally voters in swing states. They try – with varying degrees of success – to stay focused on a clear and concise closing message. At the same time, each country is investing huge resources to increase voter turnout for the last early voting period. And in these critical days, the flow of misinformation is intensifying.
Here’s what we’re looking at in the final 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 is likely to be decided.
Note that schedules can and likely will change without notice. But on Saturday, Trump began with an appearance in North Carolina, with an eyebrow-raising stop after that in Virginia, and plans to return to the Tar Heel state in the evening.
No Democratic presidential candidate has won North Carolina since Barack Obama in 2008, although it has been decided by less than 3 points in every election since then. Trump’s decision to spend Saturday there suggests Harris has a real shot in the state. But Trump is also trying to instill confidence by stopping in Virginia, a state that has been 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 in North Carolina in addition to Georgia, another Southern state that has leaned Republican for nearly three decades — that is, until Joe Biden swept it by less than half a percentage point four years ago.
Harris campaigned in Atlanta on Saturday before a rally in the North Carolina capital — signs that her team senses a real opportunity in the South. She plans to make several stops in Michigan on Sunday, moving into a Democratic-leaning blue-wall state where her allies see her as vulnerable.
Are they staying on message?
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 otherwise: 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 end up winning the presidency. Still, both candidates are off to a challenging start.
Trump begins the weekend still dealing with the fallout from his recent New York rally in which a comedian described Puerto Rico as a “floating pile of garbage.” Things got tougher for Trump late Thursday after he raised the possibility that Republican challenger Liz Cheney could be shot dead.
It was exactly the kind of inflammatory comment his allies want him to avoid at this critical time.
Meanwhile, the Harris campaign is still working to steer the conversation away from President Biden’s comments earlier in the week that described Trump supporters as “trash.” The Associated Press reported late Thursday that White House press officials had changed the official transcript of the conversation in question, prompting objections from federal officials who document such remarks for posterity.
The spotlight on presidential politics is always burning brightly. But it will perhaps burn brightest this final weekend, leaving campaigns with almost no room for error. In what both sides see as a genuine draw, any last-hour missteps could prove decisive.
How will the gender gap play out?
Trump’s apparent attack on Cheney was particularly troubling given his allies’ heightened concern about women voters.
The poll shows a significant gender gap in the race, with Harris overall having a much better approval rating among women than Trump. Part of this 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 alienated women.
At the start of the weekend, Trump allies, including conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk, warned that far more women than men appeared to be voting early. While it’s impossible to know who they’re voting for, Kirk clearly believes it’s bad news for Trump.
Trump is not helping his cause. A day before his violent rhetoric about Cheney, the former president made waves by insisting he would stand up for women whether they “like it or not.”
Harris, who will be the nation’s first female president, said Trump did not understand women’s rights “to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies.”
It remains to be seen whether the Democrat’s argument can break through this busy weekend. But Harris’ team believes there is still a significant portion of the electorate to be convinced. And they say the undecideds are disproportionately Republican-leaning suburban women.
What happens to early voting?
More than 66 million people have already voted in the 2024 election, more than a third of the total number who voted in 2020.
They include significantly more Republicans than four years ago, in large part because Trump abandoned 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 huge push for early voting in the final hours in at least three key states as campaigns work to collect as many votes as possible before Election Day.
That includes Michigan, where in-person early voting runs through Monday. Voters in Wisconsin can cast early ballots in person through Sunday, though that varies by location. And in North Carolina, voters have until 3 p.m. Saturday to vote early 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 has relied heavily on well-funded outside groups with little experience — including one group funded primarily by billionaire Elon Musk, which is facing fresh questions about its practices.
The Harris campaign, by contrast, runs a more traditional get-out-the-vote operation that includes more than 2,500 paid staffers and 357 offices in battleground states alone.
Will misinformation intensify?
Trump’s allies appear to be ramping up baseless claims of voter fraud, some fueled by Trump himself. He spent months casting doubt on the integrity of the 2024 election. in case 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 week, Trump claimed on social media that York County, Pennsylvania had “received THOUSANDS of potentially FRAUDULENT voter registration forms and vote-by-mail applications from a third-party group.” He also pointed to Lancaster County, which he claims was “caught with 2,600 fake ballots and forms, all written by the same person. Really bad ‘stuff’.”
Trump was referring to investigations into potential voter registration fraud. Application detection and investigation provide evidence that the system is working as it should.
The Republican candidate also raised baseless claims about overseas ballots and noncitizen voting and suggested without evidence that Harris might have access to some classified inside information about election results.
Expect such claims to increase, especially on social media, in the coming days. And remember, a broad coalition of senior government and industry officials, many of them Republicans, found that the 2020 election were the “safest” in American history.
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Associated Press writers Zeke Miller and Will Weissert in Washington, D.C., and Jill Colvin and Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.