Kamala Harris and Donald Trump raced across key battleground states in the final hours of campaigning in a last-ditch push for votes, as Americans prepared to head to the polls on Tuesday in one of the closest presidential elections in modern history.

The US vice-president said America was ready for a “fresh start” and claimed the momentum was with her as she held her final rally outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania, the biggest prize among the swing states that will decide the election.

“So America, it comes down to this. One more day, just one more day in the most consequential election of our lifetime. And the momentum is on our side,” Harris said.

Trump also campaigned in Pennsylvania, promising supporters in Pittsburgh a new “golden age” for the country if he were to win a second term in office.

The Republican former president later staged his final rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with a sprawling speech that ended past 2am.

“This is the last one,” he said of the event as he urged supporters to vote. “If we get out our people, it’s over, there’s nothing they can do about it . . . To make you feel a little guilty, we would only have you to blame.”

According to the Financial Times poll tracker, Harris holds a 1.5 percentage point lead over Trump nationally. But among the swing states, the vice-president has a narrow lead only in Michigan and Wisconsin, while Nevada is even and Trump has a small edge in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona.

Senior Harris campaign officials said they were on track to win a close contest and believed undecided voters were moving to their side, but they also acknowledged that it could take days to get a final result.

“We are very focused on staying calm and confident throughout this period,” Jen O’ Malley Dillon, the Harris campaign chair, told reporters on Monday afternoon.

In the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania, which has a large Puerto Rican community, Harris sought to boost her support among Latinos after a comedian at a Trump rally in New York made offensive comments about the Caribbean island and US territory last month.

“I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy . . . we are fighting for a democracy right now,” she said.

Harris was supported by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive New York member of the House of Representatives, and by rapper Fat Joe, who attended the rally and urged Latinos to support Harris. “Where is your orgullo? Where is your pride?” the rapper said.

After days of vitriolic and angry campaign rallies that focused more on his grievances against his political foes and bizarre vows to “protect” women, Trump struggled to recalibrate his message on the economy and immigration.

In Reading, Pennsylvania, Trump spoke in front of female supporters holding up pink signs that read: “Women for Trump.”

In Pittsburgh, former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, with whom Trump openly feuded a few years ago, appeared at his rally to endorse him, while Joe Rogan, the podcaster with a large male following, also announced his support.

“A vote for Trump means your groceries will be cheaper . . . your pay cheques will be higher, your streets will be safer and cleaner, your communities will be richer and your future will be brighter than ever before,” Trump told the crowd in Pittsburgh.

Trump’s efforts to project a more positive message to voters were undermined when JD Vance, his running mate, called Harris rubbish during a campaign stop in Atlanta, Georgia, earlier in the day.

“In two days, we are going to take out the trash in Washington, DC, and the trash’s name is Kamala Harris,” JD Vance said.

In Grand Rapids, Trump called Harris a “very low IQ person” and a “radical left lunatic who destroyed San Francisco”.

Meanwhile, the first results of the election were released in the tiny hamlet of Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, shortly after midnight local time, with Trump winning three votes and Harris winning three.

Some people who attended Trump’s Pittsburgh rally had travelled long distances. Renée Hughes, a retiree, flew from Sitges, Spain, to vote and attend the rally in her hometown.

“We have to get our country back,” she said. “We have become an embarrassment. Trump is a real person. He gets us, the normal people, not the elites.”

Holly Gallogly, a retired teacher from Pittsburgh, on the other hand, said: “I voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, but in the past few months I have moved to become undecided because I struggle with the hate rhetoric.”

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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump raced across the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania on Monday, in a last-ditch quest to secure the final votes in one of the tightest US presidential contests in modern history.

The state has 19 electoral votes and has been long viewed as crucial for both candidates’ path to the White House, with Trump winning there in his successful 2016 campaign but losing by 80,000 votes out of nearly 7mn cast four years ago.

The focus on the biggest swing state in the campaign’s waning hours is a sign of how the Democratic vice-president and Republican former president are looking for every possible vote in an election that surveys suggest will be decided by a razor-thin margin.

The Financial Times poll tracker shows the candidates in a statistical tie in all seven swing states, which stretch from the eastern seaboard to the industrial Midwest to the western sunbelt.

Speaking on Monday to volunteers in Scranton, a city in north-eastern Pennsylvania, Harris did not mention Trump by name, but sought to contrast her more optimistic vision for America with his more downbeat view of the country.

“This whole era of this other guy . . . it makes people feel alone. It makes people feel like there is nobody standing with them,” Harris said. “Let’s be intentional about building community . . . about reminding people we have so much more in common than what separates us,” she said.

In the campaign’s final days, Democrats have been cheered by what they believe is a decided shift in polling towards Harris — including a surprising lead in a much-watched survey of Iowa that showed her ahead in what many analysts believed was a solid state for Trump. Aides to the former president dismissed the poll as an outlier.

Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Harris campaign chair, was upbeat about the election’s outcome, saying that “people who are making up their mind are breaking to the vice-president”. She added that a shift was occurring “in all of our battleground states”, especially with core Democratic voter groups such as the young, Black people and Latinos.

But she acknowledged that the race was so close that the outcome might not be immediately clear. “We may not know the results of this election for several days, but we are very focused on staying calm and confident throughout this period,” she said.

More than 78mn Americans have already voted early, either in person or by mail, according to the leading tracker of pre-election day voting at the University of Florida. At least as many are expected to turn out on election day on Tuesday.

Harris raced across Pennsylvania in her final push on Monday — including two large rallies in the state’s biggest cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia — while Trump stopped at Pittsburgh and Reading, a mid-sized city in south-east Pennsylvania with a large Latino population. He was scheduled to cap off the day with an event in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

After being criticised for the violent rhetoric and grievance-filled speeches delivered during his last campaign appearances, Trump on Monday tried to focus on economic issues.

“Under my leadership we are quickly going to turn this economic nightmare into an economic miracle,” he said, adding that he would end “Kamala’s war on energy” by promoting fracking and drilling for fossil fuels.

Michigan is another of the too-close-to-call swing states. Trump held his final campaign rallies in Grand Rapids in 2016, when he defeated Hillary Clinton, and in 2020, when he lost his re-election bid to Joe Biden.

The Iowa poll and a handful of other pre-election surveys convinced some investors to pare their bets on a Trump victory, with the dollar weakening and Treasuries rallying on Monday.

The dollar fell 0.5 per cent against a basket of major currencies, putting it on course for its biggest one-day drop since August. The euro was 0.5 per cent higher against the US currency at $1.09. Yields on US government debt, which move inversely to prices, were lower and the Mexico peso strengthened.

Trump’s visit to Reading on Monday could be crucial to his prospects in the state as he seeks to shore up support from Latino voters, particularly those of Puerto Rican heritage, amid an ongoing controversy over a speaker at a recent Trump rally who called the US territory a “floating island of garbage”.

Harris — whose campaign has sought to capitalise on such incendiary comments — also stopped in Reading, visiting a local Puerto Rican restaurant with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman, who is of Puerto Rican descent, and with Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s popular Democratic governor.