By james art 
Kamala Harris is spending Monday in Pennsylvania, whose 19 electoral votes offer the biggest prize among the states expected to determine the outcome of the Electoral College.
The vice president and Democratic nominee will visit working-class areas including Allentown, culminating in a late-night rally in Philadelphia featuring Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.
Donald Trump kicked off four rallies in three states by addressing a roaring crowd in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he declared, “With North Carolina, I’ve always gotten there.”
“It’s ours to lose,” he said.
Mr. Trump talked about his tough immigration policy and noted some of his grievances with his Democratic opponents.
Mr Trump has later events in Reading, Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh – both of which Ms Harris is also attending.
The Republican candidate and former president ended his campaign the way he ended the first two, with a late-night event in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
There were many empty seats in the JS Dorton Arena, a 5,000-seat venue with additional floor seating in the Raleigh arena, where Mr. Trump began his campaign day.
About 77 million Americans have already voted early. Any result on Election Day will produce a historic outcome.
A Trump victory would make him the first president-to-be to be charged and convicted of a crime since his New York money laundering trial.
He would be given the power to drop other federal investigations against him.
Mr Trump would also become only the second president in history not to win terms in the White House, since Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century.
Ms Harris is vying to become the first woman, the first black woman and the first person of South Asian descent to reach the Oval Office – four years after she broke the same barriers to national office by becoming President Joe Biden’s second in command.
The vice president rose to the top of the Democratic Party list after Mr. Biden’s disastrous performance in a debate in June led to his withdrawal from the race, one of a series of convulsions that have plagued this year’s campaign.
Mr Trump narrowly escaped a would-be assassin’s bullet at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. His Secret Service team foiled a second attempt in September, when a gunman planted a rifle while Mr. Trump was playing golf at one of his Florida courses.
Ms. Harris, 60, presented herself as a generational change from Mr. Biden, 81, and Mr. Trump, who is 78.
She has emphasized her support for abortion rights since the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended the constitutional right to abortion services, and has regularly noted the former president’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
At her first stop in Scranton, Pa., Ms. Harris talked about once being a crook while running for San Francisco district attorney in 2002 and how she “campaigned with my ironing board.”
“I’d go to the front of the grocery store, outside, and I’d stand up my ironing board because, you know, an ironing board makes a really great standing desk,” Ms. Harris said, recalling taping her posters to the outside of the board , fill the top with flyers and “require people to talk to me on their way in and out.”
In Allentown, home to tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans, the vice president will hold a rally with rapper Fat Joe.
She later visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Redding with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Both Fat Joe, whose real name is Joseph Cartagena, and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez are of Puerto Rican heritage.
The suspensions come after a comic at a recent Donald Trump rally suggested Puerto Rico was a “floating island of trash.”
As recently as Sunday, Mr Trump renewed his false claims that the US election was rigged against him, reflected on violence against journalists and said he “shouldn’t have left” the White House in 2021 – dark turns that have overshadowed another anchor of his closing argument: “Kamala broke it. I’ll fix it.”
The election is likely to be decided in seven states. Mr Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016 only to see them flip to Mr Biden in 2020. North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada add to the Sun Belt portion of the presidential battleground map .