Kamala Harris tried to turn the page. And then Donald Trump read a long, winding chapter from his 2016 playbook.

The presidential candidates have barnstormed Arizona for perhaps the last time, holding dueling events barely six miles apart Thursday to make their closing arguments in a state where the contest could come down to a few thousand votes this week.

Trump, Harris and their campaign surrogates presented two remarkably different visions for the country as each closed the deal here. Now it’s up to the voters.

The choice Arizonans make when they go to the polls — and many already have — could reverberate across the nation. This is one of a handful of states where the presidential race is about as up in the air as a coin toss . Arizona will send 11 Electoral College to the winner.

“Arizona, you get to decide,” former Rep. Joe Kennedy III, D-Mass., said at a Harris campaign event in Phoenix last week.

Speaking to a crowd of 7,000 Thursday afternoon, Harris said it was time to leave the Trump era behind. The vice president delivered a 25-minute speech painting the former president as a decade-long divider in American politics and urged voters to put him out of business at the ballot box, highlighting issues such as reproductive rights, taming inflation, a tax cut for middle-class Americans and protecting health care.

“We have an opportunity to turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump trying to keep us divided and afraid of each other. We’re done with that. We are exhausted by that,” Harris said at the Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre in Phoenix. "I am not looking to score political points. I am looking to make progress.”

She promised to be a president for all Americans, even those who didn’t vote for her, and said people who disagreed with her would have a “seat at the table” in her administration. The comments were part of a broader strategy by Harris to appeal to GOP and independent voters who feel alienated by Trump. Many live in the East Valley and cast ballots that were key to President Joe Biden's victory four years ago.

Later, Trump drew a crowd twice as big to deliver a speech three times as long that offered little in terms of what a second Trump term might bring. He attacked his Democratic rivals in personal terms and doubled down on his controversial belief that there’s an “enemy from within” the United States.

Trump rehashed his political battles of the past decade , slamming his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton, knocking Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., as a “watermelon head,” calling Biden a “stupid bastard” and Harris a “sleazebag.” He took a minor detour to discuss the Robert Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and dished on how Harris backer and former Vice President Dick Cheney thanked him for pardoning Scooter Libby in 2018.

“Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face,” Trump said during the chat with Tucker Carlson, riling up his base with an ally who got fired from Fox News for reportedly holding views too extreme for the cable network.

The comment made national news and prompted a death threat investigation by the Arizona state attorney general, a Democrat. It was emblematic of the dark, violent rhetoric that Trump has used on the stump in Arizona this year to cast Harris as too liberal on top issues such as the southern border and the economy, and to keep undecided voters from turning out for her.

Trump has compared the United States to a “garbage can” for the rest of the world because of illegal immigration, and during lengthy speeches in Arizona this summer and fall referred to migrants as “animals” and painted the country as a “nation in decline” that is occupied by a “migrant invasion.”

Trump running mate JD Vance has echoed that rhetoric, saying in a visit to the state that migrant kids who don't speak English are ruining the quality of American education by distracting schoolteachers.

“Nothing against the children, but we can't have a border policy that ruins the quality of American education,” Vance said, standing between a pair of ballistic shields at a military and law enforcement manufacturer in Peoria.

Arizona: A land of contrasts

Arizona is a land of contrasts, both in people and geography. Wide wealth disparities coexist with the growing economy. The state is an emerging leader in the U.S. semiconductor industry . Its population is growing, but not yet by enough to net the state an extra congressional seat or more Electoral College votes.

This battleground state mixes Southwestern, Midwestern, Native American and Latino cultures across its 15 counties. Most Arizonans say they care about education, health, economic opportunity, the environment, civic engagement, equal treatment and immigration reform, according to a report from the nonprofit Center for the Future of Arizona.

The Arizona Democratic Party is losing ground, Republicans are holding steady, and a growing share of voters are registering with no party affiliation.

Arizona’s decided independent streak showed in 2020, when the suburbs of vote-rich Maricopa County moved toward Biden and the Latino-majority southwestern border city of Yuma shifted red.

Voters here are comfortable ticket-splitting, or voting for opposing parties on the same ballot. Many have chosen to leave their presidential choice blank and only vote down ballot in recent years. More than 34,000 voters didn’t choose between Trump and Biden here in 2020. That race came down to just 10,457 votes.

Arizona also is ground zero for some of the nation’s most inflammatory political issues. Trump and Harris each used the southern border wall in Cochise County as the backdrop to make their border security pitches this year.

Arizona has the most fortified southern border in the nation, but it’s also home to the country’s busiest stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border for illegal crossings. Arizona voters will decide Tuesday whether to make illegally crossing the border a state crime.

Also on the ballot this year is the question of whether to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution. The state briefly enacted one of the most extreme abortion laws in the nation, an 1864 near-total abortion ban, after the fall of the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade. Lawmakers swiftly repealed that 160-year-old law.

Arizona is at the sweltering forefront of the climate crisis. Temperatures surpassed 100 degrees this year for a record-breaking 113 consecutive days in Phoenix.

The state was a hotbed for election denialism after the 2020 election. Trump has claimed for years Arizona’s election was stolen by Democrats, leading to a lengthy and costly audit that found no evidence of widespread fraud.

Arizona's 2020 Republican electors and Trump aides face criminal charges accusing them of participating in a scheme to prevent the lawful transfer of the presidency by falsely certifying Trump won.

In addition to showing a close race, Arizona presidential polls have found for months that voters here have pessimistic views about the economy and the direction of the country, and are shifting rightward on immigration. More voters say they trust Trump to handle those issues, whether they plan to vote for him or not.

They’re also concerned about reproductive rights and democracy, though, and believe Harris can better tackle those problems.

Harris embraces underdog role. Trump tries to recapture his glory days

The question is whether enough voters will agree with Trump and Vance, or side with Harris and running mate Tim Walz.

While Harris focuses on unity and reaching across the aisle, Walz has taken the role of attack dog in visits to Arizona, speaking about the GOP nominee's immigration rhetoric in harsher terms on the stump here.

“Donald Trump hates this country ,” Walz said at a recent rally, casting Trump’s tone on immigration as “pathetic” and “unpatriotic.”

As the election looms, Trump allies have focused on recapturing the feeling of his shock victory eight years ago rather than his dramatic 2020 loss that is still being worked out in court. Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk told supporters in Glendale that “I have a pit in my stomach, still, from 2020” before imploring them to help get out the vote.

“We have the same energy as 2016 right now, but it’s bigger,” Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee, said at a "Team Trump Women's Tour" in Phoenix last week. The Trump campaign has done plenty to reach women, Lara Trump added, although polls show a wide gender gap between men and women voters in Arizona when it comes to Trump and Harris.

Despite gains by Democrats in Arizona during the Trump era — the party has won both Senate seats, the governor’s office, the attorney general’s office and the secretary of state’s office since 2018 — Harris and her campaign have been careful to cast themselves as the underdog in Arizona.

Former President Bill Clinton reminded voters of that dynamic when he stumped for Harris in October . Bill Clinton turned Arizona blue for the first time in nearly 50 years when he won reelection here in 1996. Twenty years later, Trump beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by 3 percentage points.

“One of the things Hillary and I have learned the hard way is there are no permanent victories in politics,” Clinton said. “Or defeats.”

Trump has done the opposite, musing on stage at a Prescott Valley rally in October that he was polling so well in Arizona that perhaps his time would have been better spent in swingy Pennsylvania, the battleground with the biggest Electoral College prize of all.