(Washington) After months of campaigning, the American presidential election is getting down to business: one of the most contested states in the duel between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris plans to launch its mail-in voting operations on Friday.
North Carolina is set to begin mailing more than 100,000 ballots this afternoon to those who don’t want to cast their ballots in person for the Nov. 5 election.
This state in the south-east of the country is one of six or seven that could determine the winner of the presidential election.
Donald Trump won by a hair’s breadth against Joe Biden in 2020. But Kamala Harris is counting on African-Americans and young people, two electorates remotivated by her candidacy, to win against the Republican billionaire.
Trump in front of police officers
The two candidates for the White House are neck and neck in the polls and the election promises to be all the more tense as Donald Trump has repeatedly suggested that he would only accept the verdict of the ballot box if he wins.
The former Republican president, who has lost the lead he enjoyed over Joe Biden before the latter’s dramatic withdrawal on July 21, is ploughing the ground ahead of his highly anticipated debate with Kamala Harris on September 10.
PHOTO DAVID DEE DELGADO, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Donald Trump
The septuagenarian will give a press conference in New York at 12 p.m. (12 p.m. Eastern time), then leave for North Carolina to speak in the afternoon before a powerful police union.
The Republican candidate blames the American president and vice president for being responsible for a wave of crime linked to illegal immigration, which statistics deny.
Security and immigration remain subjects on which Kamala Harris lacks credibility, according to several polls.
PHOTO KACEY CHAPMAN, BLOOMBERG
Kamala Harris
Preparation for the debate
His campaign team sought to respond on Friday by releasing a letter of support signed by police officers.
“In November, Americans will have to choose between someone who has spent his life enforcing our laws and someone who has been convicted of breaking them,” the message read, referring to the Democrat’s former career as a prosecutor and her opponent’s criminal conviction in a case involving concealed payments to a former porn actress.
Donald Trump, who is being prosecuted in several other cases and is particularly accused of trying to overturn the result of the 2020 election, will hold a campaign rally on Saturday in Wisconsin, another highly contested state in this indirect universal suffrage election.
Her rival set up camp in Pennsylvania on Thursday, her base camp to prepare for the confrontation with her Republican opponent, organized by the ABC channel in Philadelphia.
The vice president, who has given only one interview since entering the race, will also give an interview to a Spanish-language radio station in the middle of the day.
Big money
According to media reports, she is expected to make a few public appearances before the televised confrontation, breaking with Joe Biden’s strategy of disappearing from the radar for several days to prepare for his June debate against Donald Trump, during which he completely lost his footing.
The fifty-year-old will be relying on a substantial war chest.
Her campaign team announced that it had raised $361 million in August, “three times more” than the opposing camp, she assures.
This brings the amount raised since the vice president entered the campaign, after Joe Biden withdrew on July 21, to $615 million, according to a press release.
The Democrat has a reserve of new money of 404 million dollars, less than two months before an election that is causing pharaonic spending on both sides.
No less than 370 million dollars will be spent on Kamala Harris’s side in advertising, broadcast on television and on the internet, between now and November 5.
Donald Trump’s campaign team, for its part, reported on Wednesday that it had raised $130 million in August, and had a war chest of $295 million immediately available.