The election that is expected to cost more than any other in the United States' history is just days away, and Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have been blitzing the battleground states. Harris kicked off the week in Pennsylvania, while Trump started it in New York — the place that made him a billionaire and a felon but has never voted to make him president.
Both candidates have been crisscrossing the nation — Harris in Air Force Two, Trump in Trump Force One. From Monday, Harris and Trump ratcheted things up, making multiple stops each day.
Harris has been making closing argument speeches — first in Washington DC at the location where Trump called on his supporters to "stop the steal" before they stormed towards the Capitol after the 2020 election. From there, Harris took her campaign through Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
The Democrats are hyper focused on the battleground states and aren't making the mistakes of campaigns past, ensuring Wisconsin is part of the final push. Both candidates darted west for Sun Belt stops in Arizona and Nevada, before setting course for the closest races and the finish line. This is the American election industry in full flight.
Pundits believe there are seven states up for grabs — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona.
Mapping the most-visited locations of the candidates, it is obvious internal polling is telling their teams the same thing.
Every state and every stop in this final push is a strategic one, designed to shore up the base, get people out to vote and convince the so-called "undecideds".
This race is predicted to be close — perhaps the closest ever — but it is also extremely well-funded and with just days to go, the nominees are raiding their war chests.
They're spending big on blanket advertising, a sprawling ground game and gruelling travel schedule.
Campaign finance experts say it takes $US1 billion to win the American presidency. This is how it's done.
Multiple assassination attempts, a post-primary change of candidate, celebrity endorsements, a problematic comedian, the richest man in the world and a garbage truck — this presidential campaign has taken some turns.
On the ground in the United States, November 5 can't come soon enough.
But in this final sprint, there are some notable differences in how the Democratic and Republican campaigns are storming to the finish line and how much they've got to spend while they do it.
Where they compare right now is in the polls, especially in the highly coveted state of Pennsylvania. Current polling has Harris and Trump deadlocked in the state.
They're also close to being tied in terms of the amount of attention being paid to Pennsylvania as they hunt down the 19 electoral college votes on offer there.
Since September 1, Trump has visited Pennsylvania 19 times; Harris 20, with more stops to come before Tuesday.
Pennsylvania is part of what was once the so-called "blue wall".
Together with Michigan and Wisconsin, it represented an unofficial voting bloc that was reliably Democrat, but in 2016, Trump changed that.
Now bleeding across the so-called blue wall are bright red spots, or perhaps swathes.
In 2020, Joe Biden won all three of these Mid-West states. When Pennsylvania was called for Biden, the election was too. But the closest result across the blue wall was in Wisconsin.
In that state, organisers have long known they would have to run very different campaigns in 2024.
And over the past week, the full force of the two major travelling roadshows arrived.
How the show came to Wisconsin
When Biden stepped down and endorsed Harris as the Democratic nominee, her first rally was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
She had planned to be there just days after the Republican convention was packed down and to take the stage as the vice-presidential candidate.
But by the time the house lights were on her, Harris was auditioning for the lead role.
Since then, Harris has been to Wisconsin nine times.
Trump has been back to the state known as America's "dairyland" seven times since his party's convention on July 23.
They may have paid Pennsylvania and Michigan more attention overall, but over the past week it was Wisconsin's turn.
On Wednesday night local time, while Trump was climbing into a rubbish truck in Green Bay in north Wisconsin, Harris was on the campus of the University of Wisconsin Madison in deep blue territory talking to students about the future.
And again on Friday night, the two candidates went head to head — both rallying in Milwaukee, the state's biggest city.
Veteran Republican pollster and president of North Star Opinion Whit Ayres told the ABC: "It is incredibly close in Wisconsin according to all public polling."
Polling averages published by Five Thirty Eight had Harris at 48.2 per cent and Trump at 47.4 per cent as of Saturday.
"Polling is not precise enough to be able to make a distinction between a 48 and 47," Mr Ayers said.
"The best we can say, based upon polling in Wisconsin, is that the race is a dead heat."
Polls help campaigns determine where they're vulnerable and where to deploy resources and what the next major moment on the calendar will be.
When Harris's team decides another event is needed in Wisconsin, Hannah Gaffney's day changes.
She's the regional Get Out the Vote director for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.
"Things just happen really quick. We will find out, sometimes less than 24 hours before someone will come into town, and all of our plans will change, and we have to accommodate for Secret Service or way more people than we anticipated," she said.
"It's so fast, and it's really impressive. I think the difficult thing about it is, in terms of getting out the vote, we not only want to motivate the base, but also bring new people into the electorate."
For that reason, the campaigns have multiple speeds. One of them is the ground game.
Boots on the ground
It's easy to say every vote counts, but what that means for campaign teams on the ground is figuring out where there is a possible gain to be made.
In Wisconsin, local television channels are full of political ads that run back-to-back, separated only by the occasional commercial for a local garage door business.
The campaigns are searching for people who don't usually cast a ballot in elections, and trying to change their minds.
This group is referred to as "low-propensity voters", but there's a risk they simply turn the television off amid the advertising onslaught.
Wisconsin member of the Republican National Committee Terry Dittrich said the ground game was about "chasing" would-be voters, starting with knocking on their door.
"We stay with them. We chase them all the way to the point where we can confirm whether they've voted by absentee or whether they're going to vote in person and make sure that they actually get there and vote," he said.
"So it takes a lot of manpower, takes a lot of data, takes a lot of follow-up."
Listening to canvassers do this, they're very particular in their language. Do you have a plan to vote? What identification will you take with you? How will you get to the polling station? You could vote early – something both campaigns have been encouraging Americans to do.
Mr Dittrich said in his home county of Waukesha, his team had been out chasing voters for 24 weeks.
But at a national level, the Republican Party has also been outsourcing the ground game.
"The Democrats have put enormous amounts of money and time and effort into the ground game," Mr Ayers said.
"The Trump campaign, on the other hand, has basically subcontracted much of their ground game to third-party vendors, and we'll see if that's very effective."
Long-time Republican voter Michael, who asked for his last name not to be used, was there to see Trump speak in Wisconsin on Wednesday. It was his first Trump rally.
Michael said this was also the first election that had motivated him to join the local effort to go and find people who may not vote and usher them to the polls.
"I've been boots on the ground," he said.
"I've been doing a lot of the … data entry work, as we go around and we canvass, we're knocking on doors of Republicans and we're looking at the voter rolls and making sure they're accurate."
He said in his community of Two Rivers along Lake Michigan, the Republicans have had "a much, much better ground game than they've had in the past".
"There is a real sense of urgency. There's no way you can escape it.
"Between television, social media, and people knocking on your door, you really get that sense that people realise how important it is."
But Michael said he was not doing this work in association with the official Trump campaign, but via something called a super political action committee (PAC).
The term refers to numerous tax-exempt groups that campaign and influence politics on behalf of members or vested interests.
But they sit outside the campaigns themselves.
"It's an unusual strategy. In the past, Republican National Committee has run the ground game, and they have for some reason, decided to subcontract kind of third-party groups," Mr Ayers said.
Among those outside groups is America PAC and its backer Elon Musk, the self-styled champion of "Dark MAGA".
Recently, alarm bells started ringing over the outsourcing strategy and whether it had a hope of working, with some reporting describing Trump's ground game in Michigan as being "left to Elon Musk's America PAC, podcasts, and vibes".
On the quaint University of Wisconsin Madison campus, the ground game feels different to that.
Most days of the week throughout the campaign, the UW Madison chapter of College Democrats has been staffing a table covered in Harris Walz stickers.
The students diligently swap in and out between classes as they volunteer to direct their peers towards the on-campus polling station.
Chair of College Democrats at UW Madison Joey Wendtland said: "Students are more likely to listen to fellow students."
"One of my favourite things is seeing people come back with that 'I Voted' sticker after we talked to them," he said.
These Americans are also part of a ground game, but one that's part of the Democratic Party itself.
On Friday afternoon, as the surrounding fraternity and sorority houses were gearing up for Halloween parties, Get Out the Vote and College Democrats held a "block party" to reach more potential voters.
Mr Wendtland said it was about removing the barrier between students and the politics that impact their lives.
"We had [congressional] representative Mark Pocan ... he was actually out tabling with us yesterday, and it's really cool, because he's on the ballot, so it's cool to give people that opportunity to speak with him," he said.
"There were just random people walking by, and we'd ask, 'Oh, do you want to speak with your congressman? He's right here.' And people go 'Oh, really.' And they want to have that conversation."
The College Democrats and UW Madison might be just one small trestle table, but they are part of a behemoth of a campaign machine.
Right now, Kamala Harris "is everywhere".
"She is on television, has a larger ground game, has larger social media influence, so the Harris campaign is more prominent across a various range of communication strategies, but it's still tied," Mr Ayers said.
"The problem is you don't know what is going to move those final few people in the remaining days before the election, and so you try to do everything you can possibly think of."
And you try the things you can afford.
Billion-dollar presidency
For Harris’s campaign, the possibilities are endless.
The Democratic nominee made a stop in Las Vegas, Nevada on Thursday and while she was there, her campaign projected her face onto the Sphere, a recently opened indoor stadium, with an exterior made entirely of LED screens.
If you have to bet big to win big in Sin City, with just days to go, maybe Harris’s face being beamed from the 112-metre-high orb could sway some voters.
In January, PR Week reported a spot on the Sphere would set the advertiser back roughly $US450,000 ($686,000).
At the final filing deadline before the November 5 vote, both the campaigns had to declare how much cash they had to work with.
At that time, on October 16, the Harris campaign had a nest egg of $US119 million.
But as Brendan Galvin from election funding research group Open Secrets said, "Trump did not have much money in the bank".
"The Trump campaign had $US36 million cash in the bank, which is pretty light for a presidential campaign at this point," he said.
The Harris campaign committee has now cracked the $US1 billion mark in terms of total funds raised, while Trump's official funding sits at $US381 million.
Trump has benefited from those third-party groups and outside spending to the tune of more than $US694 million, but in recent weeks Harris has reduced the gap.
When asked how much it costs to fund a successful presidential campaign, with the private jets, the massive staff, the ground game and the unbreakable stream of network advertisements, Mr Galvin said: "You're really going to need a billion dollars to get you over the line."
Of course on election day though, Americans are voting on more than who to send to the Oval Office.
Open Secrets is forecasting this election, including congressional districts and other down ballot races, will be the most expensive ever, with the total amount spent reaching $US15.9 billion, exceeding the 2020 spend of $US15.1 billion.
"Our elections have become their own little economy," he said.
"We don't see any indicators that this is going to slow down."
Credits:
Reporting: Emily Clark in Wisconsin and Mark Doman
Photography: Emily Clark, Bradley McLennan and Reuters
Design: Brody Smith
Development: Thomas Brettell
Digital production: Mark Doman and Emily Clark
