A Presidential election unlike any other in US history entered its last full day on Monday with Donald Trump and Kamala Harris scrambling for an edge in a contest each portrays as an existential moment for America.
Even after the astonishing blur of events over the last few months, the electorate is divided down the middle, both nationally and in the seven battleground states expected to determine the outcome.
The winner may not be known for days after Tuesday's vote.
Former president Trump, a 78-year-old Republican, survived two assassination attempts weeks after a New York City jury made him the first former US president to be convicted of a felony.
Vice-President Harris, 60, was catapulted to the top of the Democratic ticket in July – giving her a chance to become the first woman to hold the world's most powerful job – after President Joe Biden, 81, dropped his re-election bid under pressure from his party.
For all of that turmoil, the contours of the race have changed little and polls have shown Harris and Trump running neck and neck since the summer.
More than 78 million voters have already cast ballots in early voting, but the next days will provide a critical test of whether Harris’s or Trump's campaign does the better job of driving supporters to the polls.
"It's ours to lose," Trump told thousands of supporters gathered in an arena in Raleigh, North Carolina, one of the seven battleground states. "If we get everybody out and vote, there’s not a thing they can do."
It was the first of four campaign stops for the former president. Harris, meanwhile, planned to campaign across Pennsylvania, another crucial swing state.
Voters have broken century-old participation records in the last two presidential elections, a sign of the passion that Trump stirs in both political parties.
Both sides are flooding internet platforms and TV and radio stations with a last round of ads. Harris’s campaign team believes the sheer size of its voter mobilisation efforts is making a difference, and says its volunteers knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors in each of the battleground states this weekend.
"We are feeling very good about where we are right now," campaign chairperson Jen O'Malley Dillon told reporters. The campaign says its internal data shows that undecided voters, particularly women, are breaking in their favour, and says it has seen an increase in early voting among core parts of their coalition, including young voters and voters of colour.
Trump’s campaign has outsourced most of the work to outside groups.
Those groups have been more focused on contacting Trump supporters who do not reliably participate in elections, rather than undecided voters.
By cherry-picking the voters they want to contact, Trump and his team say they are sending door knockers to places where it makes a difference and being smart about spending.
"The numbers show that President Trump is going to win this race," senior adviser Jason Miller told reporters.
"We feel very good about where things are."
Meanwhile, in Saginaw County, a bellwether of Michigan where voters swung from Trump to Biden four years ago, the stakes could not be higher, especially for the American auto industry.
For many voters in Michigan, who feel growing unease about the days ahead, these industry stakes underscore what they view as deeper divides across the nation.
"People have just really gotten into very hardened positions on both sides ... The kind of trust that maybe we used to have, it seems to be very limited right now," local resident Camille Orso told Xinhua, recalling that since the 1960s when civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests carried the country, public trust declining.
“Trump and his supporters have fed on that and try to increase distrust and fear on people who are not like them.”
John Franks voiced the deep-rooted distrust of the political establishment, saying: “Our state is corrupt and it has to change. I think he (Trump) opened our eyes to see how corrupt our government actually is.”
Franks voted for Trump in the past two elections and firmly believes the 2020 election was “stolen” from the third-time Republican nominee.
Cyrena Matingou, an African American graduate student who voted early for Harris, agreed that the election is less about Trump. She focuses more on the actual policies like reproductive rights, inflation and the cost of daily living.
“These are issues that everybody in the United States is facing. I do think that there are other bigger issues that will affect us as a country for the long term and how our position in the world and how we’re interacting with other countries.”
Cape Times