Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are wooing the southeastern battleground state of North Carolina just three days before Tuesday’s US presidential election, which opinion polls show to be on a knife’s edge.

It’s the fourth day in a row that Vice President Harris and former President Trump have visited the same state on the same day, underlining the critical importance of the seven states likely to decide the race.

New polling shows a close race in “blue wall” states, with a slight tilt toward Harris in Michigan and Wisconsin and a tie in Pennsylvania, while the candidates remain deadlocked nationwide, CNN reported.

More than 70 million Americans have already cast ballots, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida, below the record early-voting pace in 2020 during COVID-19, but still indicating a high level of voter enthusiasm.

At a rally in Gastonia, North Carolina, Trump said he would deport millions of immigrants if elected and warned that if Harris were to win, “every town in America would be turned into a squalid, dangerous refugee camp”.

Harris said the former Republican president would abuse his power if he returns to the White House.

“This is someone who is increasingly unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and the man is out for unchecked power,” she said.

Saturday (local time) also marks the last day of early voting in North Carolina, where over 3.8 million votes have been cast, while the state’s western reaches are still recovering from Hurricane Helene’s deadly flooding.

Harris plans appearances with rock star Jon Bon Jovi in Charlotte, the biggest city in North Carolina, which is tied with Georgia for the second-biggest prize of the swing states.

Each has 16 votes in the Electoral College, where 270 are needed to secure the presidency.

North Carolina backed Trump in 2020 but elected a Democratic governor on the same day, giving hope to both parties.

“We have an opportunity in this election to turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump, who has spent full time trying to have the American people point fingers at each other,” Harris said at a rally in Janesville, Wisconsin, on Friday.

“This election is a choice between whether we… have four more years of gross incompetence and failure, or whether we will begin the four greatest years in the history of our country,” Trump told a crowd in Michigan on Friday.

Trump criticised the federal government’s response to the disaster and repeated his false claim that aid had been diverted from the state to help immigrants entering the country.

He also said that residents of US suburbs, traditionally seen as a refuge from crime and other dangers, are under threat.

“The suburbs are under attack right now. When you’re home in your house alone, and you’ve got this monster that got out of prison, you know, six charges of murdering six different people,” he said.

Violent crimes dropped in the US last year. However, Trump and his allies have emphasised crime on the campaign trail and falsely suggested immigrants are responsible.

Harris and Trump have very different policies on major issues including support for Ukraine and NATO, abortion rights, immigration, taxes, democratic principles and tariffs.

Harris and Trump were both in North Carolina on Wednesday, Nevada on Thursday and Wisconsin on Friday – all battleground states – at one point holding events around 11km from each other.

It indicates the enormous effort put on persuading a relatively small number of voters in a few states, because the other states are seen as safely Democratic or Republican.

But Trump will also visit Salem, Virginia, on Saturday (local time) despite polls showing a clear lead there for Harris.

In the swing state of Georgia, Harris called this one of the most “consequential elections of our lifetime”.

President Joe Biden, a Democrat, won Georgia by just 0.3 percentage points in 2020, the first time his party had picked up the state since Bill Clinton in 1992.

Democrats will be heavily reliant on black voters turning out and backing Harris if they want to recreate Biden’s success in a state where Black people make up just over 12 per cent of the population.

Hispanics, who total nearly 19 per cent of Georgia’s population, are also being fought over.

Trump holds a narrow 1.6 percentage-point lead over Harris in the state, according the polling average from FiveThirtyEight.

Heading into the final stretch, on Monday the Harris campaign plans to hold simultaneous interconnected organising events across all seven battleground states to mobilise voters, according to a senior campaign official.

Trump’s Cheney lash probed

Arizona’s top prosecutor says her office is investigating whether Donald Trump violated state law for suggesting a prominent critic should face gunfire in combat.

Trump has drawn outrage for comments he made about former lawmaker Liz Cheney at a campaign event in the battleground state of Arizona.

His campaign said the former president was criticising Cheney as a warmonger, but critics condemned the remarks as evidence he would target his enemies if he wins Tuesday’s election against Democrat Kamala Harris.

“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump said of Cheney on Thursday.

“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there, with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

The Trump campaign said his remarks had been misinterpreted.

“President Trump is 100 per cent correct that warmongers like Liz Cheney are very quick to start wars and send other Americans to fight them, rather than go into combat themselves,” spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

Both Harris and Cheney, a former top Republican in the US House of Representatives and the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, denounced Trump’s comments.

In a social media post, Cheney said “This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”

“They’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building, saying, ‘Oh, gee, well, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy’,” he said.

—AAP