But thousands more continued to line up for multiple blocks around the city throughout the night hoping to get into the event, which was also part of a concert series featuring Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, Fat Joe and Oprah Winfrey.

Winfrey appeared on stage with 10 first-time voters, in another sign of the Harris campaign’s strategy to mobilise young people who, like women, have traditionally leant more towards Democrats.

But in a blunt warning to anyone who was thinking of not taking part in the election, the influential talk show queen told the crowd: “We don’t get to sit this one out. If we don’t show up tomorrow, it is entirely possible that we will not have the opportunity to ever cast a ballot again.”

“All the anxiety and the fear you’re feeling, you’re feeling that because you sense the danger,” Winfrey said. “And you change that with your vote. We are voting for healing over hate.”

“She hit me the other day. I was going to say to my people, ‘Am I allowed to hit her now?’” Trump said. He added that he was talked out of it by advisers.

Trump also made a last-minute election promise to impose tariffs of up to 100 per cent on Mexico, one of America’s biggest trading partners, until it closes off its border with the United States.

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Harris started her marathon four-stop day in Pennsylvania with a pitstop for Senate candidate Bob Casey, whose race for re-election is crucial to maintain the Democrats’ 51-49 control of the Senate, before door-knocking in Reading.

She also held a rally in Allentown, an area with a high number of Puerto Ricans outraged by a racist joke made at Trump’s Madison Square Gardens rally last week, and made a surprise appearance at a Puerto Rican restaurant with progressive firebrand congresswoman of Puerto Rican descent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

At the 60-year-old vice president’s final stops in Pittsburgh and finally Philadelphia, she told the crowd that her campaign has finished how it started: “With optimism, with energy, with joy.”

Harris left the Philadelphia stage, hand in hand with her husband, Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman who could also soon be making history as the nation’s first ever first gentleman. Once they left, Lady Gaga returned to the stage to perform one more track: The Edge of Glory.

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