
By Eduardo Medina, Jack Healy and Julie Bosman
Michael Magnanti listened in his church in Oxford, North Carolina, on Sunday morning as the pastor asked whether anyone had an announcement for the congregation.
Magnanti stood from the choir loft, his voice warmed up from hymns.
“Election Day is happening on Tuesday,” said Magnanti, the chair of the Granville County Republican Party. “I’m begging you to get out and vote, because this is the most important election if you’re alive today.”
It was a final, nearly desperate plea to voters in a battleground state where the presidential race was still too close to call. Polls released over the weekend, including surveys by The New York Times and Siena College, suggested that the race between Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris was agonizingly close in swing states from Pennsylvania to Michigan to Arizona, offering little relief to Americans who are looking for resolution near the end of a long, exhausting campaign.
The uncertainty has also provided fuel. In the last hours of the campaign, candidates, staff members and tens of thousands of volunteers across the country were in an all-out sprint, racing to pin down as many voters as possible. The specter of an evenly divided race made the push from both sides to get out every last voter even more urgent and frenetic.
On arena stages and in storefront campaign offices, party leaders exhorted crowds to keep going. Volunteers set off in pairs with clipboards and kept knocking on doors, even in the rain.
They were all determined to use the time they had left to boost turnout for their candidate over the top, perhaps making a tiny difference in an election where that could be enough.
The Harris campaign appears to have maintained a ground-game advantage in many swing states, running an operation to turn out voters that is tightly structured, well-funded, and outpacing the Trump campaign in breadth and complexity. Over the weekend, the Harris campaign said it deployed more than 90,000 volunteers in swing states who knocked on more than 3 million doors.
The Trump campaign, by contrast, has relied more on outside groups for its canvassing efforts, focusing on reaching people who vote less often but are likely to lean Republican. Billionaire Elon Musk has organized a $130 million turnout effort through his political committee, America PAC, with a field operation of 2,500 canvassers knocking on doors, mainly those of rural voters of battleground states.
Asked how many canvassers had been out recently, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not provide specific numbers, but said that there were “hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the country who are working around the clock to get out the vote in their respective communities.”
In battleground states, the frenzied push to get people to the polls was apparent in the campaign’s final hours.
In Nevada, once early voting was finished, registered Republicans had cast 43,000 more ballots than registered Democrats had, alarming supporters of Harris. So, over the weekend, hundreds of people volunteering for the Nevada Democratic Party knocked on doors to try to draw out voters in Reno, the biggest city in Nevada’s only swing county. Mayor Hillary Schieve of Reno, a Harris supporter, urged residents to encourage a family member or friend to cast a ballot. “Call one person,” she said.
In Georgia, Josh McKoon, the chair of the state Republican Party, offered a similar message, telling Trump’s supporters that their own vote was not enough. The remaining hours of the campaign, he said, needed to be spent encouraging relatives and friends to turn out.
“You need to get everybody you know that is going to vote for this decent man, this good man, this man who took a bullet for us,” McKoon said at a rally Sunday.
Both campaigns turned to celebrities and high-profile surrogates, who descended on Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania to appeal to voters who might need some extra encouragement.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Lara Trump, a co-chair of the Republican National Committee, appeared at an event in Georgia over the weekend to energize women who support Trump. (Nearly 56% of the people who have already voted in Georgia are women.)
Among the volunteers who poured into counties all across Pennsylvania over the weekend was actor Sam Waterston, 83, best known for his role on “Law & Order.” He greeted other volunteers at the Democratic headquarters in Lancaster, posed for photos and went out to knock on a few doors himself.
Former President Bill Clinton popped up in Augusta, Georgia, on Sunday at a get-out-the-vote rally, encouraging Harris supporters to pursue aggressively the waning ranks of undecided Georgians.
“There’s still a handful you can actually change,” Clinton said.
In some swing states, volunteers faced wind, rain and stormy conditions, but many people said there was too little time left in the campaign to be seriously deterred by bad weather.
Dozens of volunteers in Madison, Wisconsin, filed into a Democratic campaign office on the city’s West Side on Sunday, preparing to canvass in Madison and a close suburb, Stoughton. Some wore waterproof pants and rain boots.
“One, two, three, win this!” a group of volunteers shouted in unison, gathering in a huddle before heading out to knock on doors.
On a rare rainy weekend in Arizona, Democratic canvassers fanned out across the state. On Saturday alone, they knocked on 112,000 doors and made 600,000 phone calls, Sen. Mark Kelly told a crowd at a Phoenix restaurant, where they had gathered for a get-out-the-vote push aimed at Latino voters.
“Folks, this is crunchtime,” Kelly said. “This is close, and we’ve still got some work to do to win this election.”
Some campaign events looked like a fevered celebrations, attracting voters in costume and flying “Make America Great Again” flags from pickup trucks.
In North Carolina, where a New York Times poll released on Sunday showed Harris leading by 3 percentage points, Republicans made one final weekend push: a district-spanning jamboree aimed at instilling confidence in their base and winning over conservative holdouts who had not yet voted, according to Michele Woodhouse, the Republican Party chair for the 11th Congressional District in North Carolina.
A Trump road rally called “the Red Surge” converged in western Haywood County, where live bands played patriotic tunes and people arrived dressed as Trump.
“If anything, a poll that shows that Kamala Harris is favored to become the president of the United States inspires Republicans and Trump supporters to make sure that they exhaust every ounce of energy that they have to make sure that everyone they know gets to the polls,” Woodhouse said.
In a flurry of phone calls to prospective voters, both campaigns focused on the logistics of Election Day: asking voters what their plans were, how they would get to the polls and whether they needed to register.
Young Republicans gathered in Nash County, North Carolina, to knock on doors, send text messages to voters and blanket social media channels with precinct opening and closing times and other information, said Mary Helen Pelt, the vice chair of the party in the county.
“There’s always that one after the fact that says, ‘I did not know it was Election Day,’” she said. “Which blows my mind, but it happens.”
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