SAN ANTONIO — A contentious presidential race unlike any other – featuring a convicted felon and a vice president taking over the ticket just over three months before Election Day – reaches the finish line on Tuesday, Nov. 5.
Vice President Kamala Harris is looking to keep Democrats in the Oval Office for another four years while former President Donald Trump, the Republican challenger, is hoping to overcome a summer assassination attempt and barrage of criminal cases to reclaim the presidency.
Either way, history will be made when the results are determined. Harris, 60, could become the first woman, first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to win the presidency. A victory for 78-year-old Trump, meanwhile, would make him the first incoming president to have been indicted and convicted of a felony; he would also become just the second president in history to win non-consecutive White House terms, after Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century.
About 77 million Americans voted early, including 8.9 million in Texas.
Check back here to see the results on election night after the polls close.
Lone Star State showdown
270 Electoral College votes are needed for either candidate to secure a victory. Texas' prize of 40 electoral votes, two more than the 2020 presidential contest, is the second-biggest in the U.S. behind only California (54)—and it's all but certain to go to Trump, barring one of the more shocking developments in U.S. political history.
Not since 1976, when Jimmy Carter won the White House, has Texas gone for the Democratic contender in a presidential election. The closest a Democrat has come to winning the Lone Star State since then is 1992, when just 214,000 votes separated George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in a race where Texarkana native Ross Perot garnered a sizeable chunk of votes while running as an independent.
2020, however, was also historically close by deeply red Texas' standards, with 631,221 votes separating Trump and then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden out of more than 11.1 million ballots cast.
The latest UT Tyler Center for Opinion Research poll shows Trump with a five-point lead over Harris, 51% to 46%. The center noted a change in Texas voters' top issues this year, with abortion taking over border security as the No. 1 issue since June.
Like other urban areas of the state, Bexar County has gone blue in every presidential election since 2004, when George W. Bush took 54.8% of the vote to the 44.3% share collected by John Kerry.
That's likely to be the case again this year. Per the last pre-election poll by the UTSA Center for Public Opinion Research – conducted in the days leading up to the start of early voting – Harris held a 13-point lead over Trump.
How we got here
Harris has played down the historic nature of her candidacy, which materialized only after Biden, 81, ended his reelection bid after his June debate against Trump accentuated questions about Biden's age. Instead, she's pitched herself as a generational change, emphasized her support for abortion rights after the Supreme Court's 2022 decision ending the constitutional right to abortion services and regularly noted Trump's role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol
Heading into Monday, Harris has mostly stopped mentioning Trump. She is promising to solve problems and seek consensus, while sounding an almost exclusively optimistic tone reminiscent of her campaign's opening days when she embraced "the politics of joy" and the campaign theme "Freedom."
"From the very start, our campaign has not been about being against something, it is about being for something," Harris said Sunday evening at Michigan State University.
Trump, renewing his "Make America Great Again" and "America First" slogans, has made his hard-line approach to immigration and withering criticisms of Harris and Biden the anchors of his argument for a second administration. He's hammered Democrats for an inflationary economy, and he's pledged to lead an economic "golden age," end international conflicts and seal the U.S. southern border.
But Trump also has veered often into grievances over being prosecuted after trying to overturn Biden's victory and repeatedly denigrated the country he wants to lead again as a "failed nation."
As recently as Sunday, he renewed his false claims that U.S. elections are rigged against him, mused about violence against journalists and said he "shouldn't have left" the White House in 2021—dark turns that have overshadowed another anchor of his closing argument: "Kamala broke it. I will fix it."