Harris and Trump neck and neck in polls

(Washington) Two days before their highly anticipated televised duel, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump remain neck and neck in new polls released Sunday, making the American presidential election on November 5 still as undecided as ever.

This latest round of opinion polls shows that the Republican billionaire, who presents himself as the champion of downtrodden Americans who are victims of inflation, remains in a position to become president of the United States again in January 2025, despite his legal troubles and the chaos that surrounded his departure from the White House in 2021.

For her part, Kamala Harris, who remobilized the Democratic camp after her late entry into the campaign to replace Joe Biden, is also in a position to win according to these polls.

Nationally, Donald Trump, 78, is just one point ahead of the vice president of the United States (48% to 47), according to a study New York Times/Siena College carried out from September 3 to 6, a gap too close to establish a trend.

Especially since the American election is decided by indirect universal suffrage and the whole issue is concentrated on a handful of key and highly contested states to obtain the majority of the electoral college which will designate the future president.

But here too, the suspense is total according to this same poll: Kamala Harris, who went from being an unassuming vice-president to a confirmed candidate in just a few weeks, is slightly ahead of Donald Trump in Wisconsin (50 to 47), Michigan (49/47) and Pennsylvania (49/48). The candidates are tied (48/48) in Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona.

According to another CBS News/YouGov study, also conducted from September 3 to 6 and published Sunday, the election is down to a hair’s breadth in Michigan (50/49 for Harris), Wisconsin (51/49) and Pennsylvania (50/50).

“Superhuman”

Uncertainty is also heightened by the caution surrounding the results of polls, which had underestimated the Trump vote in 2016, when the billionaire businessman and former reality TV star upset all predictions by winning by a hair’s breadth against Hillary Clinton, the clear favorite.

The only certainty is that the first televised debate scheduled for Tuesday evening in Philadelphia, considered the cradle of American democracy, in the key state of Pennsylvania, and broadcast on the ABC channel, is highly anticipated.

The exercise was fatal, on June 27, for Joe Biden, who appeared so diminished that he had to throw in the towel less than a month later.

Donald Trump is entering this duel after recording a major legal victory: the postponement until November 26, after the vote, of his sentence in the case of hidden payments during the 2016 presidential campaign for which he was found guilty at the end of May by 12 New York jurors, a historic first for a former president of the United States.

The decision, handed down Friday by trial judge Juan Merchan, means that American voters will not know when they cast their ballot what sentence their hypothetical future president will receive.

One of the issues at stake in the debate will be the attitude of Donald Trump, accustomed to outrages and verbal provocations who continues to assert without proof that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud and was stolen from him.

On Saturday, on his Truth Social platform, he warned that once he returns to the White House, he will impose “long prison sentences” on anyone he believes plans to “cheat” in November.

“It takes almost superhuman focus and discipline to go toe-to-toe with Donald Trump in a debate,” Transportation Secretary and Harris backer Pete Buttigieg predicted on CNN.

Beyond how she will deal with the attacks, Kamala Harris is also expected to take concrete measures, while she has been criticized for the lack of details in her proposals.