Tuesday Briefing: The U.S. Campaign’s Final Stretch

With one week to go until Election Day, Kamala Harris is centering her closing argument on the stakes of another Trump presidency. Donald Trump held a provocative closing rally in New York City.

Overall, Harris leads by less than one percentage point, according to The New York Times’s polling average. It’s her smallest lead since mid-August. The battleground states remain extraordinarily tight, with no candidate holding any material lead in the seven states likeliest to decide the presidency, Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, writes.

Still, aides to Harris have quietly grown more bullish on defeating Trump. Her strategists are increasingly hopeful that the campaign’s attempts to cast Trump as a fascist, paired with a robust battleground-state operation and strength among female voters still energized by the rollback of abortion rights, will carry it for Harris, albeit narrowly.

Trump’s allies are pushing back, but even some in his camp are worried that his depiction as a budding dictator who has praised Hitler could move a small but potentially meaningful number of voters. At his closing rally on Sunday, a range of speakers took the stage, spewing vitriol and vulgar references to Harris — one described her as “the Antichrist.”

The comic who kicked off the event dismissed Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” before deriding Hispanic people as failing to use birth control, Jews as cheap and Palestinians as rock throwers. The Trump campaign distanced itself only from the statement about Puerto Rico.