Kamala Harris will arrive in Philadelphia on Monday afternoon, where she will face Donald Trump on Tuesday for a highly anticipated debate, in a presidential election that all polls predict will be extremely close.
• Also read: Trump-Harris debate: What are the challenges for both candidates?
The Democratic vice president is expected to arrive around 4:40 p.m. local time in Pennsylvania, one of the key states in the November 5 election.
The former Republican president will land on Tuesday at around 6:30 p.m. local time, just before the showdown organized by ABC in the city where American democracy was born.
In an interview recorded last week, an excerpt of which was broadcast Monday on X by her camp, Kamala Harris judges that, in front of the cameras, her rival will use “his old hackneyed recipes. He has no limits in his baseness and we must be prepared for that.”
The 59-year-old Democrat, who expects Donald Trump to “tell a lot of lies,” wants to attack her opponent as a man “who is fighting for his own interests, not for the American people.”
Before this announced highlight of an extraordinary campaign, completely turned upside down by the withdrawal in July of President Joe Biden, the Democratic camp also released a new video on Monday compiling violent criticism from former big names in Donald Trump’s administration, including Vice President Mike Pence, in order to describe the 78-year-old billionaire as a “danger” to the country.
A more detailed version of the program of Kamala Harris, who is campaigning on a promise of a “new path” but who has so far only distilled a few concrete proposals, has just been put online.
The former Republican president has made a series of public appearances while his rival has spent most of the last three days holed up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with her preparation team, only going out for walks with her husband, Doug Emhoff, or grocery shopping.
Fluctuating polls
On his Truth Social platform, Donald Trump warned Saturday that once he returns to the White House, he will impose “long prison sentences” on anyone he believes plans to “cheat” in November.
On Sunday, the Republican, who accuses Joe Biden without evidence of having “stolen” the victory from him four years ago, wrote, also on Truth Social: “We will win Pennsylvania by a wide margin, unless the Democrats are allowed to cheat.” He had won the state narrowly in 2016, and lost it very narrowly in 2020.
Donald Trump, who is facing charges of trying to overturn the results of the last election, has not committed to conceding defeat this time.
Pennsylvania, with its 19 electoral college votes and its tendency to swing from one camp to the other, is one of the swing states the most coveted.
Like the two previous presidential elections, the 2024 election could be decided by a few thousand votes in certain strategic counties in six or seven pivotal states, due to the indirect universal suffrage voting method.
For voting intentions at the national level, the polls sometimes give the advantage to the Democrat, who has completely remobilized her party but who still has to make herself known to a good part of the population, and sometimes to the Republican, whose electoral base does not seem to be affected either by her legal troubles or by her outrageous or disjointed statements.
An opinion poll released Monday by ABC credits Kamala Harris with 50% of voting intentions against 46% for her rival among Americans registered to vote, and 52% against 46% among voters who plan to go to the polls.
A study published Sunday by the New York Times gives the former president, targeted by an assassination attempt in July, a one-point lead over the vice-president (48% against 47%).
