American Battleground: The fight to the finish — and what lies beyond the 2024 campaign

CNN
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Editor’s Note: This is the conclusion of a five-part series that tells the story of the closing months of the 2024 presidential campaign, starting with the June debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Read the first, second, third and fourth installments.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are hosting the New York Yankees in the World Series, inflatable ghosts and plastic skeletons are springing up in yards everywhere, and on the last Friday in October, almost half the country thinks the man with a solid chance to be the next American president is a fascist.

A new ABC News/Ipsos poll says 49% of registered voters agree that Trump fits the definition of “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents.” Vice President Kamala Harris is with them.

“Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” Anderson Cooper asked her in a CNN town hall just two days earlier.

“Yes, I do. Yes, I do,” Harris said, “and I also believe that the people who know him best on this subject should be trusted.”

She is pushing into the final days of the race by pointing to a parade of former Trump insiders who have raised alarms against him ever occupying the White House again. They include Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, John Kelly, who told The New York Times that Trump “never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world — and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted.” Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, former national security adviser John Bolton, and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper have raised red flags over Trump’s leanings. In a new book by celebrated journalist Bob Woodward, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley calls Trump “the most dangerous person in this country” and “fascist to the core.”

As expected, Trump blasts them as disgruntled losers, and his defenders rush to the rescue. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham goes on the Sunday morning talk show circuit to say, “I was around him, I don’t think he’s a fascist!” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell pairs up with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to issue a rare joint statement that reads in part, “Labeling a political opponent as a ‘fascist,’ risks inviting yet another would-be assassin to try robbing voters of their choice before Election Day.” They ignore Trump’s habitual smears against Harris in which he says, “She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist.”

Still, that all pales next to Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in deep blue New York City on Sunday evening. His team bills it as the traditional closing argument for his campaign. It emerges instead as an ugly spectacle, with speaker after speaker flinging bigoted insults at Harris and her Democratic partners.

“She is the devil. She is the antichrist.”

“Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country.”

“The whole f**king party — a bunch of degenerates.”

“We need to slaughter this ‘other’ people.”

There’s a joke about a Black man and a watermelon, a swipe at Jews, and more from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who calls Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”

Mindful of the roughly 6 million Puerto Ricans in the mainland and Trump’s already strained relationship with the island, his team quickly says that quip “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” The rest of the slurs at the Garden are left untouched, and when Trump is asked about the vitriol later, he sounds as if he were somewhere else. “The love in that room – it was breathtaking,” he says. “It was a lovefest, an absolute lovefest, and it was my honor to be involved.”

In the moment, Trump’s big event is almost tailor made to help Harris, reminding voters of the division, anger and petty vengeance that at times characterized his single term. The candidate’s speech straps neatly into the fury of the other speakers, as he too rips into Harris and the Democratic politicians standing with her. “They’re smart and they’re vicious,” he tells the seething crowd, “and we have to defeat them. And when I say the ‘enemy from within,’ the other side goes crazy. They are indeed the ‘enemy from within.’”

For weeks preceding his rally at the Garden, Trump has been suggesting, if elected, he would use the federal government and military to handle that “enemy” – hinting at targets among elected officials, media figures, judges and more. GOP lawmakers have scrambled to say he really means only radical, violent, criminal leftists. A Fox News interviewer says to the candidate that the enemy within is “a pretty ominous phrase, if you’re talking about other Americans.” Trump replies, “I think it is accurate.”

To dispel any confusion before making that infamous closing argument, Trump had hopped on Truth Social. “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law,” he writes, “which will include long term prison sentences…this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials.”

“He really wants to, in his mind, avenge the loss in 2020.” On “The Ezra Klein Show,” The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, who has covered Trump for years, is explicit about one of his chief goals in this election. “He wants to exact payback on people he thinks deserve it. He’s been quite clear about that.”

CNN senior reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere can see the calculation on both sides of the political spectrum. “Yeah, a lot of his people love to hear him say ‘the enemy within,’” he says, “but she (Harris) is hoping… more people who are up for grabs will be turned off by it.”

With just over a week until Election Day, several ballot drop boxes have been set on fire, some voting offices are installing bulletproof glass, Trump is raising baseless claims of Democrats stealing the election as rightwing websites echo him, and tens of millions of Americans have already cast ballots.

It is not clear who might benefit from the early surge. GOP pollster Frank Luntz insists the return rate of Republican ballots has “got Democrats worried as hell,” but he also allows that the early arrivals might be cannibalizing votes Trump would otherwise get on Election Day. Only a sliver of true “undecideds” is up for grabs, so Trump seems focused on agitating his base, which has helped pull him up from his slightly trailing position in the polls. CNN’s last national survey before Election Day has Trump and Harris deadlocked at 47%.

“I think the Trump camp feels very confident that their coalition is entirely built,” says Michael Duncan, co-host of the conservative podcast “Ruthless,” “and so it is less about closing the deal with undecided voters. It’s more about just turning out the voter coalition you’ve built.”

Conservative commentator Erick Erickson tells his YouTube audience, “This is a tied race technically, but in being a tied race the trajectory now points toward a Donald Trump victory and not a Kamala Harris victory.” He is convinced a primary force helping Trump is “Republican voters who do not like Donald Trump coming home to Donald Trump.”

After being battered by Harris for several weeks, Trump and his team brought those voters back into the fold with tried-and-true tactics: unleashing a scorching series of attacks on her character and experience. Now at seemingly every stop, he calls her “dumb” or “mentally disabled” or a dangerous “lunatic.” He rails that her “sinister forces” are intent on destroying the country by throwing open the border with Mexico, tolerating rampant crime, and in some unexplained way, unleashing “World War 3.”

He misleads about her policies. He calls her resume fiction, insisting she never worked at McDonald’s – a point he tries to drive home with a photo op of him serving fries at the fast-food chain. At a campaign rally where he bafflingly expresses admiration for the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitals, he says to the crowd, “You have to tell Kamala Harris that you’ve had enough, that you just can’t take it anymore. ‘We can’t stand you. You’re a sh*t vice president.’”

It’s crude, it’s rude, but for Trump’s campaign it is right on target.

“They were successful in defining her in their image in the months of September and October,” CNN’s Jeff Zeleny says, noting how virtually all of Trump’s commercials now are negative. “It’s a fear election at this point. Donald Trump is making people afraid to vote for her.”

Plenty of commentators, polls and political researchers say the economy is unequivocally the top issue, and it offers a natural line of attack for Trump. But the former president, always trusting his instinct most, keeps circling back to the genesis of his political creation. “I don’t think it’s the economy. I think it’s the border,” he says at a Pennsylvania forum on the concerns of older folks.

CNN’s senior political analyst Gloria Borger is not surprised Trump sees that as the core of his campaign. “He doesn’t like talking about the economy,” she says. “He thinks it’s quote ‘boring.’ Immigration is his go-to.”

In a campaign full of wild swings by Trump, his choice to once again go with his golden gut is a frustration for many Republicans inside and outside his campaign. It is also a reminder that, for all the posturing about his corporate acumen, Trump has spent most of his life as head of a small – albeit wealthy – family business where he’s been free of virtually all oversight. By many accounts, that unfettered experience and the freedom to indulge his whims served him poorly in office where witnesses say he constantly chafed at laws, rules and political realities that limited his presidential muscle and drove his admiration for foreign autocrats such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

“We know what Donald Trump wants,” Harris says in DC just outside the vice presidential residence. “He wants unchecked power.”

Now Trump’s freewheeling ways may also be a weakness for Harris to exploit, although many pundits believe as a woman of color she must move cautiously against her older, White male opponent.

“She’s judged differently,” says journalist Eva McKend, who is following Harris for CNN. “If she were out there talking about a celebrity’s genitalia, no one would think it was cute or endearing. People would have real problems with that. So that is why she may sound kind of rehearsed.”

Shortly after Harris assumed the Democratic candidacy, Republicans began accusing her of relying on teleprompters too much and sidestepping interviews. But as the race streaks to the wire, she is showing much more willingness to face tough journalists and step into hostile settings than Trump. She joined Fox News for a contentious sit down, she agreed to the “60 Minutes” grilling, and was amenable to another debate. Of the two contenders, Trump is now the one sticking to friendly forums and dodging tough questions.

Perhaps with reason. Trump’s at times ill-considered and off-color comments on the trail are creating a paradox as his team tries to lock in everything it can for the home stretch. “His campaign apparatus has never been stronger,” Zeleny says. “He has never been weaker, I think.”

Still, Trump consistently tries to lash Harris to the sitting president. CNN’s Laura Coates notes that while Harris is running a strong campaign, her affection for and allegiance to Biden are a challenge. “It is a very difficult needle to thread,” Coates says. “On the one hand, to be thought of as very distinct from Joe Biden, and on the other hand, be able to not be critical of the administration that you still are a part of.”

Harris and her team’s hopes depend on moving deliberately and with discipline. Her campaign stops and interviews, like Trump’s, are carefully selected by a phalanx of political pros. Unlike his, which often devolve into rambling, her moves and those of her surrogates are calibrated and executed with relative precision. In the battlegrounds, actress Julia Roberts is dispatched to her home state of Georgia. In Michigan, the rapper Eminem joins a Harris rally in his hometown of Detroit. The candidate sits down with Oprah, appears with Beyonce, and chats with radio host Charlamagne tha God about the reluctance of young Black men to vote for her. Former first lady Michelle Obama makes a passionate appeal for men in general to consider the health of the women in their lives. “If we don’t get this election right,” she says, “your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women, will become collateral damage to your rage.”

The campaign is checking off boxes and going so full bore, CNN’s Dovere notes of former President Barack Obama, “there was a day when he recorded 21 videos for Harris in one day – 21 videos. That means they are putting them out to different channels in ways that will probably never come across to you or me.”

Trump wants his campaign organization to do its job, but he is counting on his own outsize personality, instinct and committed followers to carry him to victory. Harris is betting on hard work.

“They are confident in the strength of their ground game,” McKend says from her observations of the Harris team on the trail. “You have to remember, even before Vice President Harris became their nominee, they had extensive infrastructure in place in the battleground states in terms of the get-out-the vote operation, registering voters – there was a plan.”

That plan, however, is slamming up against an unpredictable opponent. As Trump’s 2020 campaign communications director Erin Perrine puts it, “Donald Trump is a political anomaly. He is not a political rule. Nobody else can run like Donald Trump.”

In speeches and interviews for weeks, Trump has proven it by citing false statistics, making unfounded accusations and claiming unearned honors by the score. When he is plainly caught, his supporters often retreat to the adage all politicians lie.

That’s probably true, says CNN fact checker Daniel Dale, who notes that Harris has been caught in some falsehoods too. But he adds, “There are a few key differences between Trump and other politicians. One is frequency, just the sheer quantity of lies from Trump just vastly exceeds anything we see from literally anyone else in national politics. Two is the sheer triviality of a lot of this stuff. Trump is telling lies about the tiniest things for no apparent reason sometimes.”

Some of his falsehoods play out badly in the waning weeks of the campaign. When Trump raises claims that the Biden-Harris administration is failing to provide timely aid to flood-ravaged communities in the wake of Hurricane Helene, Republican governors along the path say that’s not true. Some of his statements are laughably false. At a Univision town hall, Trump is asked about his supporters storming the US Capitol after the last election, beating police officers and calling for the hanging of then-Vice President Mike Pence. He previews what will be his response to the Madison Square Garden event when he replies, “That was a day of love.”

The torrent of falsehoods is not the only peculiar baggage Trump carries into the homestretch. At a town hall in Pennsylvania, a couple of people require medical attention, and Trump suddenly announces, “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music… Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” Then for more than a half hour, he dances onstage while he plays DJ, calling for tunes from The Village People, Sinéad O’Connor, and ironically, a song from “Cats.”

In previous weeks, Trump has befuddled campaign watchers with musings about electric boats, sharks and what to do when sinking. He has declared to women voters, “I will be your protector,” and labeled himself the “father of IVF” – while simultaneously admitting he just recently learned what in vitro fertilization is. He has frequently drifted off into baffling stream-of-consciousness riffs that leave audiences scratching their heads. He explains that he’s just processing many radically different ideas all at once in an intellectual maneuver he has dubbed “the weave.”

Such moments spur Harris to call Trump “unstable” and “unhinged.” He has been attacking her mental capacity for weeks, culminating in the claim she is “totally bonkers.” It is worth noting this accusation of mental impairment is a pro forma slur from Trump. He raised it against Biden in 2024 and 2020, and against Hillary Clinton in 2016. For himself, Trump has repeatedly claimed he “aced” a cognitive test, while refusing to ever release the results of such an exam. Indeed, while Biden and Harris have released comprehensive medical assessments, Trump has been so protective of his own medical records there is still no definitive answer to the questions: How tall is he and how much does he weigh?

Amid all that turmoil and with time running out, both camps are also strategizing for what might follow the final vote. There are deep concerns that getting clear results from the election could be complicated and time consuming.

“We’ve seen the largest explosion of pre-Election Day litigation in our nation’s history,” CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen says. Republicans have filed well over 100 lawsuits challenging which ballots should be counted, and how the results will – or won’t – be certified. Democrats have filed suits too, pushing back on Republican moves they feel are aimed at suppressing the vote. And Eisen suspects we are nowhere near the end of the legal action. “We know from 2020 that they have a propensity – Trump and his allies – for filing baseless litigation. And Trump has already refused to say that he will accept the election results without qualification.”

That and the potential for violence, whoever wins, is casting a dark cloud over everything.

Framed by the October night, American flags and with the White House glowing behind her, Harris steps to a podium in the 52-acre park called the Ellipse. She is there to reach out to those presumably dwindling undecided voters. Senior adviser Stephanie Cutter was wearing a four-leaf clover necklace when she said, “If they were going to vote for Trump they would have voted for him. So they are open to us.”

“We know who Donald Trump is,” Harris announces to the assembled crowd as she makes her way through what may be the most important speech of her life. “He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election – an election that he knew he lost!” The crowd roars.

Harris lays out her closing argument just as Trump did two days earlier. Despite issuing sharp warnings about her opponent, her message is decidedly more upbeat than his, full of promises and hope for a future of inclusion, mutual respect and unity.

“This election is more than just a choice between two parties and two different candidates,” she says. “It is a choice between whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American or ruled by chaos and division.”

In half an hour, it is over. Some version of that choice has been raised by both candidates repeatedly throughout the campaign, and although last-minute rumbles may shake the land, both sides have now made their cases. For practical purposes, only the voting remains.

On Tuesday, the winner of this turbulent, seemingly endless campaign will be decided, although it may take days or weeks for that decision to reveal itself. But even when the votes have all been tallied, the suspicion, resentment and fears raised among the country’s citizens will surely remain unresolved.

Political history shows that for decades voters have been reaching for some sort of elusive change in the way their government operates. Some want to slip back into the standards of the past, ostensibly simpler years when communities were more homogenous, economic advancement seemed more predictable and “wokeness” was not a word. Opponents find that notion stifling and too focused on favored classes. Others want the nation to vault forward to a progressive era, where social norms are reconfigured and a new sense of society arises – which, again, the other side finds intolerable. And still others remain somewhere in the murky middle.

Across the spectrum, many dread that democracy as Americans know it is no longer up to fulfilling either dream or closing the chasm between the disagreeing camps. Too many residents of red states feel economically abandoned, politically disenfranchised and socially ridiculed by their urbanized cousins. Too many blue staters feel angry at the recalcitrance of their relatives beyond the city limits and robbed of the power of their votes by an electoral system that gives Wyoming’s 600,000 residents as many US senators as California’s 39 million.

Churches, schools, libraries, hospitals, sports arenas, farmers markets, offices, public parks, gas stations, restaurants and more have become flashpoints for aggrieved souls exhausted by the constant sense of conflict, as partisans flood the media with fresh calls to fight. The divisions have Balkanized states, fractured communities, driven friends to stewing silences and families to slamming doors. For many on all sides, this extraordinarily contentious election has made them feel like strangers in their own land, where nothing seems familiar and the comfort they once knew has slipped away.

Each party has its answers for the future and ideas about who belongs in this country and who doesn’t, about which rights are inviolate and which are up for grabs, and about what it means to be a patriot. In a nation of some 337 million people, it is inevitable that disputes over such matters will arise.

But among all those people, this election has also underscored endless similarities: the near universal desire for decent homes, secure families, adequate education, health care, employment, respect, freedom and hope, which historically have always been best addressed by people united not just in name but also in deeds.

All of that suggests any success from this election may come not from the triumph of the winners, but from their treatment of everyone else – the attention given to the concerns, fears, beliefs, and grief of those whose choice comes up short. Perhaps only with that generosity and “the better angels of our nature,” which Abraham Lincoln invoked at his inauguration in 1861, will Americans finally be able to leave this bitter election behind and walk away from the battleground we have made.