US presidential election: Decisive face-off on Tuesday between Trump and Harris

Hibapress

The two candidates for the American presidential election, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, are preparing to face each other next week in a televised debate that could strongly influence the course of the campaign, while the two contenders are neck and neck in the polls.

Scheduled for prime time on ABC News on Tuesday, the 90-minute face-off, which will be watched by tens of millions of Americans and viewers around the world, is a moment of both opportunity and peril, commentators say.

The importance of such duels can be seen in light of the last debate between Republican candidate Donald Trump and President Joe Biden on CNN, in which the latter’s “disastrous” performance forced him, three weeks later, to withdraw from the race for the White House.

For Tuesday’s debate, which will be moderated by ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis, both sides have agreed to the rules of the showdown, although each candidate has complained that some conditions are unfavorable to him.

The event will be overseen by a host of senior executives from the 24-hour news network, including its new president Almin Karamehmedovic and Debra OConnell, president of the news division of Disney, parent company of ABC News.

The debate comes less than two months before the Nov. 5 election, as both candidates have largely detailed their respective platforms covering a wide range of issues from taxation to immigration and job creation to energy and climate change.

In the polls, the candidates are neck and neck, with a slight advantage for the former president, who is one percentage point ahead of the current vice-president (48% against 47% of voting intentions).

Those numbers, which are within a 3% margin of error, have not changed since July. A poll conducted by The New York Times in collaboration with Siena College shortly after Biden withdrew gave nearly the same results.

The neck and neck is particularly palpable in the seven swing states (Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), these American states in which voters are historically undecided with respect to the candidates of the two camps, and whose swing towards one or the other of the two contenders decides the outcome of the elections.