The curtains are slowly coming down on a political season that was clearly dominated by a level of lies, falsehoods, bigotry and vitriol not seen in a Presidential election.

And the closing messages from the former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris could not have brought out the contrasts better.

In Madison Square Garden, surrogates of Trump and the principal himself waded into a eleventh hour mess. The show in New York can be summarised as disgusting at best. Even more nauseating is the argument that it should all be taken as a “stupid” joke. Referring to the Vice President and Democratic party nominee as a “Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ, former Prosecutor” may be seen as something coming out of ignorance.

But to call her a devil, anti-Christ and her campaign run by pimps is not funny at all. Or for that matter referring to Puerto Rico as an Island of Garbage.

The Trump campaign soon caught on to the mess it had on its hands, making earlier rants like Haitian migrants killing and eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, pale into insignificance.

‘Love fest’

Forget the hair splitting difference between Hispanics, Latinos and Puerto Ricans. Amidst the cries of exuberance at the MAGA rally last Sunday, there was a quick realisation that even a small shift in voters listening to the poison spewed could make the difference.

But Trump was in denial: that the show at Madison Square Garden was a “love fest” or that he had nothing to do with the speakers on stage.

Media reports maintain that close to one million Puerto Rican voters are in the battleground states with close to 500,000 in Pennsylvania alone; over 120,000 each in North Carolina and Georgia; and thousands more in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. And there was this belated “finding” that most of the Hispanic vote was in the Southwest!

In stark contrast was Harris’ “final” message that had a mix of both symbolism and substance. The Vice President told a massive gathering on the Ellipse —the same place where the former President directed his supporters on January 6, 2021, to “fight like hell” resulting in violence and mayhem on Capitol Hill— that voters had a critical decision to make.

“It is a choice about whether we will have a country rooted in freedom for every American — or ruled by chaos and division,” she said, laying out a policy vision for America that included immigration, health and childcare.

Heading into the final days, the real anxiety lies in an outcome that has to be accepted.

And the apprehension is that Trump and his campaign have laid an extensive groundwork to challenge the result in case things fall apart. One of the last polls by CNN indicates that 69 per cent believe that Trump will not concede should he come up short on November 5.

The thinking is that Harris would have to come out with a decent margin in the Electoral College. In 2020, President Joe Biden came away with a 306 to 232 margin which itself was contested vigorously by Trump.

Today the fear is that 2024 should not go down to being determined by a single state. Many remember the year 2000 when a conservative United States Supreme Court handed Florida and the election to Republican George W Bush.

The writer is a senior journalist who has reported from Washington DC on North America and United Nations