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

Note that schedules can and likely will change without warning. But on Saturday, Trump began with an appearance in North Carolina, with one eyebrow-raising stop in Virginia next, and planned to return to the Tar Heel state in the evening.

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 Sunday. But he also has another appearance scheduled for North Carolina in addition to Georgia, another Southern state that has leaned Republican for almost three decades — that is, until Joe Biden carried it by less than a half percentage point four years ago.

Harris campaigned in Atlanta on Saturday before a rally in North Carolina's capital — signs that her team is sensing genuine opportunity in the South. She’s planning to make multiple stops in Michigan on Sunday, shifting to a Democratic-leaning state in the “blue wall” where her allies believe she is vulnerable.

Trump's campaign leadership wants voters to be focused on one key question as they prepare to cast ballots, 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 be thinking about another: Do they trust Trump or Harris to put the nation's interests over their own?

Whichever candidate can more effectively keep voters focused on their closing arguments in the coming days may ultimately win the presidency. Yet both candidates are off to a challenging start.

Trump opens the weekend still facing the fallout from his recent New York City rally in which a comedian described Puerto Rico as a “floating pile of garbage.” Things got harder for Trump late Thursday after he raised the prospect of Republican rival Liz Cheney's death by gunfire.

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 in the week that described Trump supporters as “garbage.” The Associated Press reported late Thursday that White House press officials altered 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 burn brightest, perhaps, this final weekend, leaving the campaigns virtually no margin for error. In what both sides believe is a true tossup election, any final-hours missteps could prove decisive.

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

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

Going into 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 whom they're voting for, Kirk clearly believes that's bad news for Trump.

Trump isn't helping his cause. A day before his violent rhetoric about Cheney, the former president made waves by insisting that he would protect women whether they “like it or not.”

Harris, who would be the nation's first female president, said Trump doesn't 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 on this packed weekend. But Harris’ team believes there's still a significant chunk of persuadable voters out there. And they say the undecideds are disproportionately Republican-leaning suburban women.

More than 66 million people have already cast ballots in the 2024 election, which is more than one-third the total number who voted in 2020.

They include significantly more Republicans compared with four years ago, largely because Trump has backed off his insistence that his supporters must cast ballots in person on Election Day.

And while early in-person voting has ended in many states, there will be a huge push for final-hours early voting in at least three key states as the campaigns work to bank 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, although it varies by location. And in North Carolina, voters have until 3 p.m. Saturday to cast early ballots 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 is relying heavily on well-funded outside groups with little experience — including one group funded largely by billionaire Elon Musk that’s facing new questions about its practices.

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

Trump's allies appear to be intensifying baseless claims about voter fraud, and some are being amplified by Trump himself. He has spent months sowing doubts about the integrity of the 2024 election in the event he loses — just as he did four years ago.

His unfounded accusations are becoming more specific, in some cases, as wild claims begin to show up 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 Mail-In Ballot Applications from a third party group.” He has 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 was referring to investigations into potential fraud related to voter registration applications. The discovery and investigation into the applications provide evidence the system is working as it should.

The Republican nominee has also raised baseless claims about overseas ballots and noncitizens voting, and suggested without evidence that Harris might have access to some kind of secret inside information about election results.

Expect such claims to surge, 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 the “most secure” in American history."

___

Associated Press writers Zeke Miller and Will Weissert in Washington, and Jill Colvin and Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.

11/02/2024 16:19 -0400

© Copyright The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.