Kamala Harris arrived in Philadelphia on Monday, the day before her highly anticipated debate with Donald Trump in a presidential election that all polls predict will be extremely close.
The vice president landed late in the afternoon in this Pennsylvania city where American democracy was born.
The former Republican president will go there on Tuesday, around 6:30 p.m. local time, just a few hours before the confrontation organized by the ABC channel in this decisive state in view of the November 5 election.
In an interview recorded last week, an excerpt of which was broadcast Monday on X by her camp, Kamala Harris judges that her rival will use in front of the cameras “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 former Vice President Mike Pence, describing 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 a walk with her husband Doug Emhoff or to shop at a grocery store.
Fluctuating polls
On Saturday, the Republican warned that once he returned to the White House, he would impose “long prison sentences” on anyone he believed planned to “cheat” in November.
Donald Trump, who is being prosecuted for seeking to overturn the results of the last election, has not committed to conceding defeat.
Pennsylvania, with its 19 electoral college votes and its tendency to swing from one camp to the other, is one of the most coveted swing states.
Donald Trump narrowly won the state in 2016 and narrowly lost it in 2020.
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 voting method which is based on indirect universal suffrage.
Nationally, the polls give the advantage sometimes to the Democrat, who has succeeded in galvanizing her party but who has yet 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 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).