| In The Early, we’ve been covering all aspects of this campaign season — House and Senate races, ballot initiatives and presidential campaign strategy. With one week until the voting ends, we decided to take a step back and examine where the presidential campaign stands in these final crucial days. The candidates will visit each of the seven battleground states in the final week. The polls are tied. The campaigns of Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump and their allies have spent more than $2.67 billion on television and digital ads in the presidential race, including $886 million from Harris’s campaign and Future Forward, its allied super PAC, according to AdImpact. Trump and the super PAC backing him, MAGA Inc., have spent $662 million so far. Tonight, Harris is going to give her closing statement on the Ellipse, just off the National Mall, a picturesque setting with the White House in the background. It’s the same place where Trump spoke to his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, before a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, which is why Harris chose the location to deliver a big speech. We’ll have more on Harris’s speech below. Trump’s final week Trump is in perhaps his strongest position since he rode Trump Tower’s golden escalator down to launch his presidential campaign in 2015, even after nine years of personal and professional tumult. He was impeached twice, sought to overturn his 2020 election loss and spread lies that led to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. His coalition is built around men, who his campaign aides say gravitated toward Trump in even greater numbers after his New York felony conviction for falsifying business records, because they saw him as a victim of a rigged criminal justice system. People close to Trump say his attendance at UFC fights was instrumental in his comeback, giving him an air of invincibility and grit among an audience looking for a fighter. His criminal trials are a key reason he is determined to win. His charges in Georgia and the case brought by special counsel Jack Smith for Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election are likely to be dropped if Trump wins next week. “Trump understands the impact [of the election outcome] for him personally,” said one Trump confidant who speaks with him regularly and was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. “Win or go to jail.” Trump has said in campaign speeches that he will exact revenge on his political opponents if he wins. - “In the past week alone, Trump has become increasingly specific about how he would go after his perceived opponents and made comments that have alarmed Democrats and Republicans alike, including his claim that “the enemy from within” is a bigger threat than the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un,” our colleagues Tyler Pager, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Josh Dawsey report.
But his campaign ads focus on Harris. The campaign’s most aired ad last week in the seven battleground states was a spot that includes a clip of Harris on “The View,” where she was asked whether she would have done anything differently than President Joe Biden if she had been president. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she replied. Trump’s team is exuding confidence. They note that the polls in 2020, which showed Trump down more than eight points to Biden, and in 2016, which showed him losing to Clinton by four points, undercounted his support. This year, polls show that he is essentially tied with Harris in all seven battleground states, and his team suggests the polls are once again not correctly taking into account the level of Trump’s support. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s close adviser and campaign manager during his 2016 campaign, said Harris has the money but Trump has the momentum. - “Money is distorting in politics, just as money is distorting in life. It can’t buy you certain things. A billion bucks in ads later and it hasn’t brought answers to that nagging, stubborn question, ‘Kamala, who are you?’ We know you’re not Biden. We know you’re not Trump. But who are you?” Conway said in an interview. “The obscene amount of money she has spent on paid advertising has started to have a bit of a boomerang backlash effect.”
Despite outsourcing most of their ground game to third-party organizations like Turning Point Action, the campaign is confident in its new system of engaging volunteers to be in constant contact with low-propensity voters. Plus, they point to the Republican National Committee’s focus on encouraging supporters to vote early through the Bank Your Vote program and the Trump campaign’s Swamp the Vote website to tell people how to vote early. Trump aides are also encouraged by early-vote numbers in Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia that show a major uptick of Republicans casting early ballots from previous elections, even though it is important not to read too much into early-voting numbers. Trump has an 11th-hour challenge, though. Racist remarks toward Puerto Ricans from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at his Madison Square Garden rally Sunday night is creating backlash in a community that Trump has been courting this cycle. Harris’s final week Harris, who has been a candidate for just under 100 days, is focusing on Trump’s character in the final days of the election, calling him unfit for office, unhinged and an agent of chaos. She is also attempting to capitalize on controversies surrounding Trump, including echoing remarks his former chief of staff John F. Kelly, who said he had fascist tendencies, and making a new campaign ad highlighting Hinchcliffe’s remarks about Puerto Ricans. At the Ellipse tonight, in a major speech that her campaign calls her closing argument, she’ll question if Trump is in the race for himself or for the country, and if democracy can sustain another Trump presidency. - “Not only has it become Harris’s closing argument as she seeks to sway a tiny sliver of undecided voters, but Trump has made a series of incendiary comments about how he would govern in a second term that has prompted a series of former staffers and Republicans to speak out forcefully against him,” Tyler, Yasmeen and Josh report.
That message is echoed in the most common Harris ad aired last week in the battleground states, which warns a second Trump term would be “more unhinged, unstable and unchecked.” The second-most aired ad is about abortion, Harris’s other central theme of the campaign. Jim Messina, former president Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, says Trump’s character and abortion rights are both messages of contrast that Harris will weave together in her closing argument. “They’re going to say, ‘Vote for me instead of him, because of the fact that he’s a threat to democracy and he’ll end your right to abortion.’ That has been the theory of their case,” Messina said. Harris is enlisting a long list of star-studded surrogates to join her on the campaign trail, from Beyoncé to Bruce Springsteen. Singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers appeared with Harris and Tim Walz in Michigan last night. The Mexican pop rock band Maná is expected to appear with her in Nevada later this week, an attempt not only to appeal to those stars’ supporters for votes but to lean into the joyful campaign she promised. Democrats, on brand, are still anxious about how close the race is. But Messina said Harris has “one strategic advantage.” “From the very moment that the campaign was started, their theory was, ‘We’re going to build the largest ground game in the history of American politics,’ in the assumption that in a tie race, a field operation gets you from one to two points in the battleground states,” Messina said. | 
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Leigh Ann Caldwell and 
