Donald Trump in a desperate scramble across five states to win votes

Trump traveled through five states on Sunday and will trek across five more on Monday

Donald Trump posing with a mask of his face tossed on stage by a supporter in Florida Chip Somodevilla/Getty

It was a surreal moment of levity amid the breackneck final leg of Donald Trump's bumptious presidential campaign: on stage in Sarasota, Florida on Monday morning, the Republican nominee borrowed a rubber mask of his own face from a supporter and brandished it at the podium. "Nice head of hair," he declared, before tossing the mask back to its owner.

The Sarasota rally was the first stop on the Trump campaign's furious scrample across five states in the last 24 hours of this epic and exhausting election: Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Michigan.

Despite the urgency of the moment, Mr Trump appeared as easily distracted as ever from his campaign's core issues. In Raleigh, North Carolina, he continued on a theme that has pre-occupied him at rallies in recent days: the bad language used by Beyonce and Jay-Z during their performance at a Hillary Clinton event last week. "Those words were disgusting," he complained, before claiming that he draws "bigger crowds" than the musical couple.

The first two states on his Monday schedule are must-wins for the property developer, and polls suggest the race remains on a knife-edge in Florida and North Carolina. The margins appear to be tight in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, too, though a new survey released on Monday by the University of New Hampshire put Ms Clinton 11 points ahead in the Granite State.

If nothing else, the wild poll swings of recent days and weeks are an indication of just how uncertain this race has become in its closing act, even as Ms Clinton apparently maintains her modest national lead.

Mr Trump began his zig-zagging cross-country dash over the weekend, in hopes of convincing voters of the Democrat's alleged disqualifying corruption in time to snatch a few key swing states from her grasp. This in spite of FBI director James Comey’s Sunday announcement that his agency would not, after all, change its previous conclusion that Ms Clinton's email furore merited no criminal prosecution.

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“Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to seek the office of the presidency of the United States,” Mr Trump told a crowd of supporters in Virginia in the early hours of Monday morning, after appearing nearly three hours late for the 9.30pm event.

“She’s being protected by a totally rigged system,” real estate mogul-turned reality television star-turned presidential contender added, amid the shouts to jail his opponent. “Hillary Clinton knows it. She knows it. The FBI knows it.

“It’s up to the American people to deliver justice at the ballot box.”

Many Republican leaders had withdrawn their support for Mr Trump early last month, following the leak of a 2005 tape that featured the candidate boasting about forcefully kissing women and grabbing them by the genitals without their consent. But the 28 October letter from Mr Comey, announcing the discovery of fresh Clinton-related emails, appeared to have reinvigorated the Trump campaign.

As early voting commenced, however, the Republican's hopes took another dive with early voting numbers in Nevada indicating a major surge in Latino voters. Polling firm Latino Decisions found that some 76 per cent of likely Latino voters planned to cast their ballot for the former Secretary of State, while only 14 per cent will choose Mr Trump.

Latino voters are expected to make an historic turnout across the US, due in part to Mr Trump’s hardline anti-immigrant platform, heralded at his campaign launch some 17 months ago, when he characterised incoming, undocumented Mexicans as criminals and rapists. That claim is likely to reverberate now, as his campaign comes to a close in critical states like Nevada and Florida, which both have substantial Latino populations.

“The story of this election may be the mobilisation of the Hispanic vote,” Republican Sen Lindsey Graham told the New York Times. “So Trump deserves the award for the Hispanic turnout. He did more to get them out than any Democrat has ever done."