Vice President Kamala Harris gathers in Las Vegas as Election Day approaches

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris will gather in Las Vegas for a rally on Sunday evening as both she and Republican Donald Trump continue to make frequent trips to Nevada to gain momentum in the swing state as Election Day approaches.

Harris will hold a rally at the Expo at the World Market Center at 6 p.m

The rally is part of Harris' recent move to the West Coast, which included her first trip to the U.S.-Mexico border since taking over from President Joe Biden on the Democratic presidential ticket. On Friday, the vice president walked along a towering, rust-colored border wall lined with razor wire in Douglas, Arizona, and met with federal authorities.

She attended a fundraiser in San Francisco on Saturday and had plans for a Sunday event in Los Angeles before heading to Nevada and returning to Washington on Monday evening.

“This race is as close as it can be,” she told a raucous crowd of donors on Saturday. “This is a race with a margin of error.”

Harris said that despite the excitement, she ran like an outsider. And she invited people to “join our team in battleground states” to help get voters to the polls — even if they are Californians making calls from home.

All voters in Nevada will automatically receive their ballots by mail unless they opt out, a pandemic-era change established in state law. That means most ballots could be mailed in just a few weeks, well before Election Day on November 5th.

Harris plans to return to Las Vegas on Oct. 10 for a town hall meeting with Hispanic voters. Both she and her Republican rival Donald Trump have frequently campaigned in the city, highlighting the crucial role that Nevada, with just six Electoral College votes, could play in deciding what is expected to be a very close election.

Trump held his own rally in Las Vegas on September 13 at the Expo World Market Center, where Harris will speak on Sunday. Her campaign often scheduled events at the same venues where her opponent had previously spoken, including in Milwaukee, Atlanta and suburban Phoenix. During his event in Las Vegas, the former president highlighted people entering the U.S. illegally and said Harris was “the president of the invasion.”

During a campaign stop in the city in June, Trump promised to eliminate taxes on tips from waiters, hotel workers and thousands of other service industry workers. Harris used her own rally in Las Vegas in August to make the same promise.

Completely eliminating federal taxes on tips would likely require an act of Congress. Still, the Culinary Union of Nevada, which represents 60,000 hotel workers in Las Vegas and Reno, has endorsed Harris.

Ted Pappageorge, the culinary union's secretary-treasurer, said the difference between the dueling proposals to not pay taxes on tips is that Harris has also committed to addressing what his union calls “subminimum wage,” in which employers pay workers in the service industry poorly salaries and meet minimum wage thresholds by expecting employees to supplement them with tips.

“It shows us she’s serious,” Pappageorge said.

Harris has no public schedule Tuesday, when her candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, faces Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio in the campaign's first and only vice presidential debate. But Harris and Walz will campaign together on Wednesday, taking a bus tour with various stops through central Pennsylvania.

The campaign says that during this transition, both will emphasize plans to boost U.S. manufacturing, including by using tax credits to boost steel production and overhauling federal permitting systems to boost America's construction industry.

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