Energized but Uneasy, the Campaigns Make Frantic Final Pushes

Democrats in battleground states have built a tightly structured get-out-the-vote operation, while Republicans have relied more on outside groups for canvassing.

Michael Magnanti listened in his church in Oxford, N.C., on Sunday morning as the pastor asked whether anyone had an announcement for the congregation.

Mr. Magnanti stood from the choir loft, his voice warmed up from hymns.

“Election Day is happening on Tuesday,” said Mr. Magnanti, the chair of the Granville County Republican Party. “I’m begging you to get out and vote, because this is the most important election if you’re alive today.”

It was a final, nearly desperate plea to voters in a battleground state where the presidential race was still too close to call. Polls released over the weekend, including surveys by The New York Times and Siena College, suggested that the race between Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris was agonizingly close in swing states from Pennsylvania to Michigan to Arizona, offering little relief to Americans who are looking for resolution near the end of a long, exhausting campaign.

The uncertainty has also provided fuel. In the last hours of the campaign, candidates, staff members and tens of thousands of volunteers across the country were in an all-out sprint, racing to pin down as many voters as possible. The specter of an evenly divided race made the push from both sides to get out every last voter even more urgent and frenetic.

On arena stages and in storefront campaign offices, party leaders exhorted crowds to keep going. Volunteers set off in pairs with clipboards and kept knocking on doors, even in the rain.

They were all determined to use the time they had left to boost the turnout for their candidate over the top, perhaps making a tiny difference in an election where that could be enough.

The Harris campaign appears to have maintained a ground-game advantage in many swing states, running an operation to turn out voters that is tightly structured, well-funded, and outpacing the Trump campaign in breadth and complexity. Over the weekend, the Harris campaign said it deployed more than 90,000 volunteers in swing states who knocked on more than three million doors.

The Trump campaign, by contrast, has relied more on outside groups for its canvassing efforts, focusing on reaching people who vote less often but are likely to lean Republican. The billionaire Elon Musk has organized a $130 million turnout effort through his political committee, America PAC, with a field operation of 2,500 canvassers knocking on doors, mainly in rural parts of battleground states.

Asked how many canvassers had been out recently, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign did not provide specific numbers, but said that there were “hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the country who are working around the clock to get out the vote in their respective communities.”

In the battleground states, the frenzied push to get people to the polls was apparent in the campaign’s final hours.

In Nevada, once early voting was finished, registered Republicans had cast 43,000 more ballots than registered Democrats had, alarming supporters of Ms. Harris. So, over the weekend, hundreds of people volunteering for the Nevada Democratic Party knocked on doors to try to draw out voters in Reno, the biggest city in Nevada’s only swing county. Mayor Hillary Schieve of Reno, a Harris supporter, urged residents to encourage a family member or friend to cast a ballot. “Call one person,” she said.

In Georgia, Josh McKoon, the chairman of the state Republican Party, offered a similar message, telling Mr. Trump’s supporters that their own vote was not enough. The remaining hours of the campaign, he said, needed to be spent encouraging relatives and friends to turn out.

“You need to get everybody you know that is going to vote for this decent man, this good man, this man who took a bullet for us,” Mr. McKoon said at a rally on Sunday.

Both campaigns turned to celebrities and high-profile surrogates, who descended on Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania to appeal to voters who might need some extra encouragement.

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Lara Trump, a co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, appeared at an event in Georgia over the weekend to energize women who support Mr. Trump. (Nearly 56 percent of the people who have already voted in Georgia are women.)

Among the volunteers who poured into counties all across Pennsylvania over the weekend was the actor Sam Waterston, 83, best known for his role on “Law & Order.” He greeted other volunteers at the Democratic headquarters in Lancaster, posed for photos and went out to knock on a few doors himself.

Former President Bill Clinton popped up in Augusta, Ga., on Sunday at a get-out-the-vote rally, encouraging Harris supporters to pursue aggressively the waning ranks of undecided Georgians.

“There’s still a handful you can actually change,” Mr. Clinton said.

In some swing states, volunteers faced wind, rain and stormy conditions, but many people said there was too little time left in the campaign to be seriously deterred by bad weather.

Dozens of volunteers in Madison, Wis., filed into a Democratic campaign office on the city’s West Side on Sunday, preparing to canvass in Madison and a close suburb, Stoughton. Some wore waterproof pants and rain boots.

“One, two, three, win this!” a group of volunteers shouted in unison, gathering in a huddle before heading out to knock on doors.

On a rare rainy weekend in Arizona, Democratic canvassers fanned out across the state. On Saturday alone, they knocked on 112,000 doors and made 600,000 phone calls, Senator Mark Kelly told a crowd at a Phoenix restaurant, where they had gathered for a get-out-the-vote push aimed at Latino voters.

“Folks, this is crunchtime,” Mr. Kelly said. “This is close, and we’ve still got some work to do to win this election.”

Some campaign events looked like fevered celebrations, attracting voters in costume and flying “Make America Great Again” flags from pickup trucks.

In North Carolina, where a New York Times poll released on Sunday showed Ms. Harris leading by three percentage points, Republicans made one final weekend push: a district-spanning jamboree aimed at instilling confidence in their base and winning over conservative holdouts who had not yet voted, according to Michele Woodhouse, the Republican Party chair for the 11th Congressional District in North Carolina.

A Trump road rally called “the Red Surge” converged in western Haywood County, where live bands played patriotic tunes and people arrived dressed as Mr. Trump.

“If anything, a poll that shows that Kamala Harris is favored to become the president of the United States inspires Republicans and Trump supporters to make sure that they exhaust every ounce of energy that they have to make sure that everyone they know gets to the polls,” Ms. Woodhouse said.

In a flurry of phone calls to prospective voters, both campaigns focused on the logistics of Election Day: asking voters what their plans were, how they would get to the polls and whether they needed to register.

Young Republicans gathered in Nash County, N.C., to knock on doors, send text messages to voters and blanket social media channels with precinct opening and closing times and other information, said Mary Helen Pelt, the vice chairwoman of the party in the county.

“There’s always that one after the fact that says, ‘I did not know it was Election Day,’” she said. “Which blows my mind, but it happens.”

Early voting ended on Friday in Georgia, and Democrats in Augusta, determined not to let an error lead to a lost vote, spent the weekend reminding voters about Election Day logistics and fundamentals. They advised residents that they could cast a vote on Tuesday as long as they were in line before the polls close at 7 p.m. Identification would be required, and one organizer warned that an ID card from a private college would not satisfy state law.

“We’re meeting voters where they are, and that takes making calls and going to doors and meeting voters,” said Jordan Johnson, a Democrat and member of the local commission in Augusta. “We are having many opportunities for people to come together, to hear from surrogates and local officials and everything in between.”

Allied Democratic groups, like unions, were busy, too. In Arizona, Unite Here Local 11, which represents hospitality industry workers, had 500 canvassers knocking on nearly 40,000 doors over the weekend, according to Susan Minato, a co-president of the union chapter. The volunteers concentrated on women, young people and people of color.

On the Republican side, the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a Christian group, had knocked on more than 500,000 doors in Arizona over the course of the campaign, with more staff members out in force in the final days, focusing on Latino voters.

“We monitor the early vote daily and have seen record turnout by voters of faith in Arizona,” said Nilsa Alvarez, the coalition’s director of Hispanic outreach.

Both Republican and Democratic canvassers were met, at times, by weary voters who were ready for the campaign to be over. This was it, the volunteers reminded them — a last burst of canvassing with just a few hours left.

In downtown Phoenix, canvassers with the left-leaning Latino-rights group Living United for Change in Arizona knocked on 22,279 doors on Sunday alone, hoping to persuade voters to turn out for Ms. Harris and to reject a border-security ballot measure that would allow local law enforcement officers to arrest unlawful border crossers — a measure that opponents said would lead to racial profiling.

The group’s canvassers said they would head out again, even on Tuesday, though they acknowledged that voters’ patience seemed to be wearing thin.

“People are getting frustrated,” said Saman Shahrood, 20, a team leader with the group. “A lot of people have already voted. They’re like, ‘We don’t want people knocking on our doors anymore.’”

Alan Blinder, Mitch Smith, Rick Rojas, Benjamin Oreskes, Maya King, Jonathan Weisman, Emily Cochrane, Campbell Robertson, Kellen Browning, Jazmine Ulloa and Soumya Karlamangla contributed reporting.