RALEIGH, N.C. — A presidential campaign that has careened through a felony trial, an incumbent president being pushed off the ticket and multiple assassination attempts comes down to a final sprint across a handful of states on Election Day eve.

Vice President Kamala Harris is spending Monday in Pennsylvania, whose 19 electoral votes offer the largest prize among the states expected to determine the Electoral College outcome. The vice president and Democratic nominee visited working-class areas, including Allentown, and ended with a late-night Philadelphia rally that includes Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.

Former President Donald Trump kicked off four rallies across three states by addressing a roaring crowd in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he declared: “With North Carolina, I’ve always gotten there.”

“It’s ours to lose,” he said.

Trump spoke on his tough immigration policies and ticked through some of his complaints about his Democratic opponents. He also seemed to reference the video that nearly sank his 2016 campaign as he expressed amazement at two giant mechanical arms that caught Elon Musk’s reusable rocket — “like you grab your beautiful baby.”

“See, I’ve gotten much better. Years ago, I would have said something else. But I’ve learned,” Trump said, prompting laughs from the crowd. “I would have been a little bit more risqué.”

The late stages of the 2016 campaign saw the surfacing of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by their genitals.

Trump had later events in Reading, Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh — both of which Harris also visited. The Republican nominee and former president concluded his campaign the way he ended the first two, with a late-night event in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

There were plenty of empty seats at the J.S. Dorton Arena, a 5,000-seat venue with additional seating on the floor, in Raleigh where Trump kicked off his campaign day. One attendee, Ebony Coots, said she regretted voting for Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 and is now backing Trump — but is nervous about Tuesday’s election. “You know, actually, I might try to go to another planet,” Coots, a 48-year-old delivery driver, said if Harris were to win.

About 77 million Americans already have voted early. Either result on Election Day will yield a historic outcome.

A Trump victory would make him the first incoming president to have been indicted and convicted of a felony, after his hush-money trial in New York. He will gain the power to end other federal investigations pending against him. Trump would also become only the second president in history to win non-consecutive White House terms, after Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century.

Harris is vying to become the first woman, first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to reach the Oval Office — four years after she broke the same barriers in national office by becoming President Joe Biden’s second in command.

The vice president ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket after Biden’s disastrous performance in a June debate set into motion his withdrawal from the race — one of a series of convulsions that have hit this year’s campaign.

Trump survived by millimeters a would-be assassin’s bullet at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. His Secret Service detail foiled a second attempt in September, when a gunman had set up a rifle as Trump golfed at one of his courses in Florida.

Harris, 60, has pitched herself as a generational change from 81-year-old Biden and Trump, who is 78. She has emphasized her support for abortion rights after the 2022 Supreme Court decision that ended the constitutional right to abortion services, and she has regularly noted the former president’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Assembling a coalition ranging from progressives such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney, Harris has called Trump a threat to democracy and late in the campaign even embraced the critique that Trump is accurately described as a “fascist.”

At her first stop in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Harris talked about once being a long shot while running for San Francisco district attorney in 2002 and how she “used to campaign with my ironing board.”

“I’d walk to the front of the grocery store, outside, and I would stand up my ironing board because, you see, an ironing board makes a really great standing desk,” Harris said, recalling how she would tape her posters to the outside of the board, fill the top with flyers and “require people to talk to me as they walked in and out.”

Standing in line for Harris’ Allentown rally, 54-year-old Ron Kessler, an Air Force veteran and Republican-turned-Democrat, said he plans to vote for just the second time in his life. Kessler said that, for a long time, he didn’t vote, thinking the country “would vote for the correct candidate.”

But “now that I’m older and much more wiser, I believe it’s important, it’s my civic duty. And it’s important that I vote for myself and I vote for the democracy and the country.”