Harris' people seem confident. Trump campaign appears to be panicking: 'He realizes he could lose'

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WWith just under 24 hours until Election Day, the contrast between the two campaigns – and the mood of their staff – couldn't be clearer.

Harris, who just weeks ago appeared to have lost the momentum she quickly built after President Joe Biden gave her the Democratic nomination last July, is on the rise thanks to a series of late-stage missteps by Trump and his colleagues Allies. Those missteps include the disastrous decision to include a comedian who called Puerto Rico an “island of floating trash” in the lineup at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden late last month.

On Saturday, renowned pollster Ann Selzer released her annual poll of Iowa voters, which found Harris leading the Hawkeye State by a three-point lead of 47 percent to 44 percent, based on an incredibly strong showing among female voters. Harris, who trailed Trump by a four-point margin among Iowans in September, also inherited a whopping 18-point deficit when she took the Democratic nomination from Biden.

Another national poll released Monday by NPR and Marist College found that Harris was supported by 51 percent of respondents, compared to Trump's 47 percent – a margin larger than the 3.5-point Survey margin of error. And the final NBC News poll of the election cycle showed Trump receiving dwindling support among black and Latino voters, while Harris showed support among 87 percent of black voters.

The Harris campaign appears to have found the right timing, wrapping up what it calls the largest coordinated voting event in history on Monday.

The campaign is holding simultaneous events in all seven battleground states, including rallies with Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, as well as programs that include the events in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as part of a national campaign Connect live stream programs.

Harris campaign chairwoman Jen O'Malley Dillon told reporters in a phone call Monday afternoon that the coordinated event was aimed at “capturing the grassroots enthusiasm we are seeing everywhere and focusing on mobilizing our voters for Election Day tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow we will have elected officials, artists and speakers who will truly reach such a broad network across all social media platforms and help ensure our message resonates in these final hours with voters who may be harder to reach or less busy . “These events will be an opportunity for massive volunteer mobilization and engagement,” she said.

Private, Democratic sources spoken to The Independent are exuding confidence, with a swing-state party leader pointing to what he described as “severe crossover voting among Republicans” and “explosive” early voting turnout in key constituencies, including Latinos.

Trump's response to a gaffe from Biden, in which the president appeared to call the ex-president's supporters “trash” in return, only appeared to have extended the news cycle that resulted from Hinchcliffe's racist diatribe. His decision to stage a photo op with a garbage truck appears to have failed to shift the focus back to Biden and instead remind Latino voters of what sparked the controversy in the first place.

And while the Trump campaign had hoped to exploit an Associated Press report that revealed that the White House communications team had tried to manipulate the official transcript of Biden's remarks to make it appear as if he had not said, what he had said Trump disregarded his own campaign's messages with a series of bizarre and unhinged appearances over the weekend. At one rally, he even appeared to have knocked down a broken microphone.

One Democratic activist suggested that the stars aligned at the exact moment Harris caused the ex-president's collapse.

“Aaron Sorkin couldn’t have written it better,” they said.

Meanwhile, Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, ended their campaign with a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's the same place where Trump ended his victorious 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton and where Trump ended his re-election race against Biden four years later.

Not only is Michigan a key swing state — and Grand Rapids a historically strong Republican area — but Trump is also notoriously superstitious and has insisted, even when forced, on ending his two post-2016 campaigns there for no reason other than sentiment , opening his day in North Carolina, a reliable GOP stronghold that he could well lose to Harris.

During Trump's appearances last weekend, the arenas he visited seemed noticeably emptier and the candidate himself appeared lost at times, fluctuating between bewilderment and threat. He suggested that an assassination attempt against him would have to fire through a packed media contingent at a particularly worrying moment to have a chance of hitting him.

A Republican activist who has worked with the ex-president's campaign in the past said it was clear that Trump was “decompensating” in response to the late Harris surge.

“He realizes he could lose the election, go to prison and maybe die there,” they said.