Kamala Harris and Donald Trump battled for holdout votes over the penultimate weekend of campaigning across US swing states, with Michelle Obama to join the Democrat onstage before the Republican nominee hosts an eyebrow-raising rally in New York.

With just 10 days left in a bitterly contested presidential race, the rivals converged on Saturday on Michigan, one of the three “Blue Wall” states — along with Wisconsin and top prize Pennsylvania — that Democrats see as critical to election day victory on Nov 5.

Polls show a dead heat in the final days of the race, and with more than 38 million people nationwide already casting early ballots, Americans are deciding whether to elect the country’s first-ever woman president, or its oldest commander in chief.

Part of Harris’s strategy is to peel moderate Republicans away from an increasingly vituperative Trump, who continues to demean some Americans as the “enemy”. The ex-president still refuses to accept his defeat at the polls four years ago and is expected to reject the result if he loses again, potentially pitching the United States into chaos.

For Republican A.D. Jefferson, a 62-year-old laborer attending Harris’s rally in Houston, the Trump turmoil is too much. “I just think she’s less controversial,” he told AFP. “I’m a Republican, but I feel like Trump is just too chaotic for me.”

Beyonce, then Michelle

Fresh off a high-energy rally in Texas with pop icon Beyonce to highlight Republican restrictions on abortion, Harris heads to Kalamazoo, Michigan where she will court voters by deploying one of the Democratic Party’s most popular emissaries: former first lady Michelle Obama.

Her husband Barack Obama had joined Harris on Thursday for a rally in Georgia.

Harris, 60, campaigns on Sunday in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the largest city in the largest of the swing states likely to determine the outcome of the presidential election under the US electoral college system. She will go from neighborhood to neighborhood across the city persuading residents to cast their ballot, as she targets historically Black and Latino districts.

Trump, who swept the three Blue Wall states in his shock victory in 2016 only to see Joe Biden reclaim them for Democrats four years later, is strategizing that clawing back one or more of the trio and winning the other so-called Sun Belt swing states would propel him back into the White House.

With just a few thousands votes possibly the difference between victory and defeat in the tightest of swing states, Trump holds rallies on Saturday in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where a robust ground game and relentless barnstorming of the battlegrounds could prove decisive.

They follow the release late Friday of the extended, three-hour interview that Trump taped for the Joe Rogan Experience, America’s most popular podcast. He is seeking to woo Rogan’s massive, largely male audience, as the Republican candidate hunts for viral moments that tap into his everyman appeal.

The Trump show

Then on Sunday night, Trump performs a campaign quirk: rallying his supporters in Madison Square Garden, the iconic arena in the heart of Democrat-heavy New York.

Analysts have pondered why Trump is campaigning in his native New York despite virtually no chance of flipping the state.

The brash billionaire and onetime reality television star may be keen to orchestrate a spectacle and demonstrate he can fill an arena in a Democratic bastion.

But critics, including Trump’s 2016 rival Hillary Clinton, have noted that Madison Square Garden was also the scene of a 1939 pro-Nazi rally organized by a group supportive of Adolf Hitler.

“She said it’s just like the 1930s,” Trump said at a Friday rally in Michigan, referring to Clinton’s remarks a day earlier on CNN. “No it’s not, no. This is called ‘Make America Great Again’.”

The weekend campaigning follows a heated row over accusations that the Republican ex-president has been running to be an authoritarian leader, following claims by Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, echoed by Harris, that Trump is a “fascist” who cannot be trusted with power again.

Courts in US battleground states are taking steps to expedite lawsuits over the November 5 election, hoping to avoid drawn-out disputes that could delay the results.

Arizona’s court system on Tuesday became the latest to adopt special procedures governing election litigation to ensure such challenges are decided as swiftly as possible. The state’s supreme court issued an order directing trial court judges to prioritise any lawsuits concerning the outcome of the 2024 election.

“Giving judicial priority to such statutory proceedings is of heightened importance in a presidential election,” Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Ann Scott Timmer wrote.

She ordered that any election-related cases must be scheduled with sufficient time for appeals to be decided, including cases concerning vote recounts and related to presidential electors, before election results must be finalised.

Arizona is one of seven competitive states expected to decide the presidential race between Republican former President Donald Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

Republicans and Democrats have filed a wave of election-related lawsuits across the country as they spar over ground rules ahead of the vote, and legal experts say Election Day will likely unleash a fresh flurry of court fights over counting and certifying totals.

After he lost to President Joe Biden in 2020, Trump and his allies unsuccessfully tried to change the outcome of the election with more than 60 lawsuits seeking to overturn the results based on false allegations of widespread voter fraud.

This cycle, Trump’s allies have already laid the groundwork to challenge the results with lawsuits raising concerns over mail-in ballot verification measures and possible illegal voting by non-citizens, amongst other issues.

The Arizona order follows similar actions to ensure speedy outcomes in post-election litigation in at least two of the other battleground states.

“These new measures seem clearly aimed at concluding litigation regarding the presidential election before the federal deadlines for certification of electors,” James Gardner, an election law expert at the University at Buffalo School of Law, said in an email.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court in August temporarily modified its rules to ensure election-related appeals were addressed in three days, rather than the usual 10, and said parties would need to file briefs within 24 hours of launching an appeal of any election-related court ruling.

Michigan’s state court administrator last month in a memo advised court clerks and judges statewide to notify the clerk of the state’s supreme court and various state officials upon the filing of any election-related lawsuit.

The Michigan Court of Appeals plans to publish on its website information about contacting its clerk’s office after business hours and the steps required of a party who might wish to seek an emergency appellate ruling, the memo said.

Courts are also girding for potential Election Day security risks after a top US judiciary official warned in September that judges could face heightened threats “during times of increased national tension.”

Justin Levitt, an election law scholar at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said preemptive orders like Arizona’s reflect a recognition that litigation over the election’s outcome is likely following the 2020 election.

“I think it’s very smart and very sensible for the courts to get ahead of the logistics, to get ahead of the process, just to make sure to get it done smoothly,” said Levitt, who served as a White House adviser on democracy policy under Biden.

“I consider myself an original Republican. We used to refer to Biden and Kamala in our house as the ‘corpse and the cackler.’” “I am a lifelong Republican — of smaller government, lower taxes, not intervening in our lives.” “I grew up in the Reagan era, and Reagan was a hero in my home. So he was my hero.” “I think in this day and age, you really can’t say that if someone is pro-choice, they must be liberal.” Abortion is changing the Republican Party this election. Here in Arizona, almost one-third of Republicans say they’ll support Proposition 139, a state ballot measure that would make abortion legal until about 24 weeks. “I would say 20 years ago, that definitely would not have been the case.” We spoke to three longtime supporters of the Republican Party about how the end of Roe v. Wade is changing their vote. “I grew up very Catholic. I never knew anybody who had an abortion. I don’t think I said the word out loud until after I’d been married.” “When I heard about Roe being overturned, I was not terribly surprised. Our state law reverted back to the previous law, which was from 1864.” “No one could quite believe it. I mean, it really came so quickly.” Passed during the Civil War when Arizona was still a territory, the 1864 law was a near-total ban on abortion. “Even conservatives in Arizona thought that it didn’t make a lot of sense.” The law was overturned in May, and a ban after 15 weeks was put into place. But it made some Arizonans rethink their stance on abortion. “I had to stop and think: Well, how do I feel about it? What could the potential repercussions be? And the more I read, the more news stories I saw, the more afraid I got for women. I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I am a mother of 10 and a grandmother. I do believe in the sanctity of life, but I just don’t believe it’s my right to choose for someone else.” “I think when people go through this, it is probably the most painful decision they’ve ever made. I was a delegate to the 2016 convention, and the day that we had the vote in Arizona to go to the convention, I realized that I was bleeding. Turns out that I somehow was pregnant and it had released. I went to the doctor, and I had to have a D&C. Let’s say the 1864 law was in place. Would they have allowed me to have a D&C? Would they have investigated me? 2016, I voted for Trump; in 2020, voted for Trump, but I won’t vote for him again.” “President Trump prides himself in the fact that he dismantled Roe v. Wade. It doesn’t serve women well. It doesn’t serve the country well. And so I can’t support and would say to friends of mine, if Prop 139 is your issue, I don’t see how you could support candidate Trump.” “I will always be a Republican. I listen to NPR in the morning, it reminds me every day why I’m a Republican, but I can’t see myself voting for either of them, for either party at this point.” “I will be voting for Kamala Harris. I have done phone banking on one occasion and I’ll be doing it again. This time, I think that a lot of Arizonans feel, and I feel like our vote actually counts.”