Election day has arrived. It’s Harris vs. Trump in the last push at the polls

After months of enduring a deluge of expertise, polls and ad pitches, voters are finally having their say.

Millions of Americans across the country are ready to head to the polls on Tuesday to choose whether to send Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump to the Oval Office.

A bruising campaign has exposed deep ideological divisions between the two parties and a gaping gender gap between Harris and Trump, women support Harris by a margin of 16 percentage points and men support Trump by 18 points, according to the latest NBC News poll.

Already, more than 77.3 million people have voted by mail and in person in advance, according to the data an NBC News analysis.

But both candidates believe their fate is tied to seven battleground states that will ultimately decide the contest. Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina ended up consuming the campaign’s most precious resources: time and money. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ads covered the airwaves from the battlegrounds as Harris and Trump held competing large-scale rallies.

On Tuesday, Trump plans to vote in person in his home state of Florida with his wife, Melania. He will then host members and top donors for dinner at Mar-a-Lago, where he will spend the evening. Once he has a sense of the results, Trump will head to the Palm Beach County Convention Center.

Meanwhile, Harris, who ended Monday night with a final rally at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the steps made famous in the “Rocky” movies, is returning to Washington. She already voted early by mail in California. She is scheduled to return to her alma mater, Howard University in Washington, on Tuesday night after the vote ends.

On the eve of the election, Harris and Trump raced to those swing states, making final pitches, each focusing on Pennsylvania, those states’ biggest electoral prize.

Harris, who could become the first female president, campaigned on restoring abortion rights and protecting democracy, while pledging to support a “care economy” that would help first-time homeowners, small businesses and people in age.

Trump often used dark — and sometimes violent — rhetoric, vowing to reset the economy and deport millions of immigrants.

Both campaigns projected confidence on Monday.

“The moment is on our side. do you feel it We have momentum, right? Because our campaign tapped into the ambitions and aspirations and dreams of the American people,” Harris said in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “We are optimistic and excited about what we will do together, and we know here that it is time for a new generation of leaders in America.”

Trump made similar proclamations at a rally in North Carolina.

“Hopefully everything will go well; we are leaders. All we have to do is close, we have to close it,” he said. “I hate the phrase, actually, but it’s ours to lose. Does it make sense to you? It is ours to lose. If we, if we take them all out and vote, they can’t do anything. And if we don’t, and if we don’t, every single person who has ever signed anything in that horribly dangerous party that will destroy our country and is already destroying our country must get it.”

The final day of voting caps a wild and sometimes tumultuous 15 weeks after President Joe Biden withdrew from seeking the Democratic nomination and threw his support behind Harris. Meanwhile, Trump endured two assassination attempts, including one in which he was struck by a bullet.

Democrats embraced Harris’ entry into the race, setting fundraising and volunteer records and registering to vote in droves. Trump won the Republican nomination even though he now has a criminal conviction and faces additional felony charges.

Forecasters had been predicting a deadlocked contest for weeks that was within the polls’ margin of error. The cash-strapped Harris campaign has made a massive ground game in battleground states aimed at getting voters to the polls. Republicans worried about their own ground operation after Trump outsourced canvassing efforts to third parties, about which they have several reports documented disorders.

Harris campaign chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a briefing with reporters Monday that the campaign has seen several avenues to reach the 270 electoral votes needed, including the “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, as well as in northern Arizona. Carolina and Georgia. Biden won all of these states in 2020 except North Carolina.

“I would say in Georgia, we like what we see. We see that we are on the verge of winning a very close race here. And in fact, as we looked day by day as we got closer to the deadline, we saw that in Georgia, in particular, the number of early votes each day got younger and more diverse,” O’Malley Dillon . said. “We’ve seen African-American voters take a larger amount of the overall vote share, and we’re seeing pretty high numbers overall for our turnout.”

Trump’s campaign boasted strong early voting among Republicans in states like Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia, a shift from 2020 after the party made a concerted effort to rack up points early on.

“President Donald J. Trump enters Election Day stronger than he has in any previous election, and if patriots across the country keep the momentum going and perform as expected on Election Day, we will be swearing in President Trump in January,” Tim Saler. , a data consultant for Trump and the Republican National Committee, said in a statement.

Harris’ team warned on Monday that election results in some states could take several days, signaling that a delay in vote counting was expected and would not be a sign of voter fraud. Trump, who has yet to concede his 2020 loss to Biden, began laying the groundwork challenge the election results if he loses again.

Polls begin to close in all states at 7:00 PM ET, including battleground state Georgia.