Wanda Clarkson finds JD Vance relatable. She appreciates his backstory – growing up in a household that struggled with poverty and drug use – and that he didn’t come from money, like some politicians.

“He knows where we’re coming from,” Clarkson, a Chichester resident, said of the Republican vice-presidential nominee.

Others call him well-spoken, inspiring, an overcomer – the embodiment of the American dream.

Clarkson, her husband Scott, and over 2,000 other New Englanders spent their Sunday evening at a Vance rally in Derry – one of his final public appearances before Election Day.

Vance spotlighted New Hampshire and its four electoral college votes as a state with the potential to change the course of the election. He said the campaign is “expanding the map” and referenced the state’s 2016 election results when Hillary Clinton beat Trump by just under 3,000 votes.

“I think what’s different this time around is that we have seen, for the last four years, the incredible failures of Kamala Harris’s governance and the way that it has affected people in this great state as much as anybody else in the union,” Vance said, emphasizing housing and energy costs, immigration and the fentanyl crisis.

Harris maintains a lead over Trump in New Hampshire, though it’s narrowed in recent months. According to the University of New Hampshire Survey Center’s latest poll, Harris leads Trump 51% to 46%. Yet voters are evenly split when asked which candidate they expect to become president.

Vance spent most of his speech attacking Harris on issues that rally attendees almost unanimously cited in interviews as top-of-mind for them: immigration and the economy.

“The record of Kamala Harris is that New Hampshire families can’t afford groceries, can’t afford rent, can’t afford to buy a house,” Vance said. “The record of Kamala Harris is that the American southern border is wide open.”

He claimed that New Hampshire has a “massive flood of illegal migrant activity” and blamed the state’s struggles with fentanyl overdoses on drug smuggling from the southern border. About 15,000 immigrants lacking permanent legal status lived in New Hampshire as of 2022, according to the Pew Research Center. An overwhelming majority of convicted fentanyl traffickers – nearly 89%, as of 2022 – are U.S. citizens, according to data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Immigrants lacking permanent legal status accounted for just over 7 percent of fentanyl trafficking convictions.

Republican congressional candidates greeted the crowd before Vance, including Lily Tang Williams, who’s running for Congress in the second district and was met with chants and a standing ovation. Kelly Ayotte, the Republican candidate for governor, wasn’t among the candidates who spoke.

Kathleen Maroney and her friend, Kim Oshana, made the drive from Middletown, Connecticut, to see Vance. Maroney remembers Trump’s four years in the White House fondly – especially for the economy.

She opened a yoga studio around the time he took office, which she said the pandemic later “destroyed.” She said she believes her life was much better under Trump.

Maroney and Oshana both expressed concerns over election integrity. Maroney said she believes the 2020 election was stolen. 

Both of them voted early – something they’d never done before but did at Trump’s urging, they said. The former president continues to change his tune on early voting, both encouraging his supporters to do so and continuing to cast doubt on the election process.

Jon Pidgeon, who lives in Bedford, brought his 13-year-old nephew, Cole, to the rally.

“It’s nice to be part of something,” Cole said. 

For Pidgeon, who works in sales, immigration and the economy are two of his biggest concerns. He also called Harris’s rise to the top of the Democratic ticket “a joke” because she replaced President Joe Biden without any vote.

“It’s kind of gross because our democracy doesn’t work that way,” Pidgeon said. He also doesn’t think she has solid policies. “Harris is going to tank the country … She doesn’t have a plan.”

Harris held a rally in the Seacoast region in September, where she unveiled portions of her economic policy plan focused on small businesses.

Many people said they viewed Vance’s visit as a chance to witness history; others said they came because the fate of the country hangs in the balance of Tuesday’s election.

For Fred DeParis, a Massachusetts resident who made the drive to see Vance, his reasoning for attending was simple.

“To save the country,” he said.

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, or send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.