The Harris and Trump campaigns are making their final pitches to voters, and their messages couldn’t be more different.

Donald Trump’s campaign has become increasingly dark as election day looms, with racist, authoritarian and misogynistic language bountiful as he continues to rail against the “enemy within”.

Kamala Harris, in contrast, held an event at The Ellipse in Washington DC in front of a bumper crowd, where she presented a “different path” forward for America and warned of a second Trump presidency.

Wesley Widmaier, a professor of international relations at Australian National University, said that as the election campaign closes, both candidates have reverted to appealing to their core supporters in an effort to maximise votes.

“In America, you begin in the primaries and you run to your extreme because you have to get your party’s base, then you run to the middle because that’s how you build a coalition,” Widmaier said.

“In the final weeks, you run back to the base because it’s about getting out the vote, which we obviously don’t do here in Australia because of mandatory voting.”

More than 80 million Americans didn’t vote in the 2020 election, despite it being a record turnout.

Freedom

Trump’s rally in front of a sold-out Madison Square Garden this week featured a string of speakers with controversial pasts and sparked serious backlash.

David Smith, an associate professor at the US Studies Centre, said the Harris campaign has shifted towards more overt warnings about Trump and away from an optimistic tone.

“They were referring to Trump and Vance as weird, trying to belittle them, but as the race has gotten closer and Trump’s racist and sexist rhetoric has intensified, they’ve shifted to talking about the threat of Trump,” he said.

“This was bolstered by former members of the Trump administration saying that he’s a threat to democracy, like John Kelly, who was his longest-serving chief of staff.”

Kelly, a retired four-star general, revealed that Trump had spoken positively about Adolf Hitler and that he believed the former president was a fascist.

Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally has drawn comparisons with a notorious Nazi rally at the same venue before World War II. Photo: Getty

Widmaier said that the Democrat’s closing message is that Trump is a threat to democracy.

“Fear of Trump is, as they say, the biggest glue holding the Democratic Party together,” he said.

“When Harris entered the campaign, it was time for the politics of joy and she emphasised freedom. Now it’s another F word: Fascist.”

Reproductive rights

At the centre of the Harris-Walz campaign is abortion rights, with this year being the first presidential election since the Trump-stacked Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and federal abortion protections with it.

Harris highlighted this in her speech and tied the two messages together by calling for freedoms won by previous generations to be protected.

“They did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives, only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant,” she said.

“The United States of America is not a vessel for the schemes of wanna-be dictators.”

Trump has tried to distance himself from the abortion issue that he previously hailed as one of his greatest successes as president.