The US presidential race remains closely contested, according to polls released on Sunday, two days before the first — and possibly only — televised debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
The latest poll confirms that Trump has the support of about half of voters, despite the Republican’s historical status as a convicted felon and his role in inciting an unprecedented effort to overturn his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden.
Harris, who joined the race only after President Biden abruptly stepped down in July, has quickly transformed herself from a little-known vice president to a serious contender. However, polls show she has not made any major gains, making the race a toss-up.
The New York Times/Siena poll found Trump, 78, leading Harris nationally, 48 to 47 percent, which is within the margin of error.
The U.S. presidential election is decided by calculating the results of state-by-state contests rather than the overall national popular vote, meaning a handful of pivotal states typically decide the balance.
The poll found that Harris, 59, had a slight lead in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and was tied in four other states – Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona.
The CBS News/YouGov poll shows Harris ahead by one percentage point in Michigan and Wisconsin, while the two are tied in Pennsylvania.
The election is already chaotic, with 81-year-old Biden dropping out of the race over concerns about his age, Trump narrowly escaping an assassin’s bullet at a rally, and fears growing that Trump will again refuse to concede if he loses in November.
The latest numbers, however, confirm that each candidate has a remarkably stable base of loyalists, divided roughly evenly across the country.
Tuesday’s debate on ABC News could be a game-changer, the only debate ever held between the two.
Trump will be under pressure to rein in his characteristic use of insults and intimidation as he faces off against a mixed-race candidate vying to become the first female president in US history.
Harris will need to use this huge audience to connect with Americans, something she was unable to do as vice president and had little time to do in her all-too-brief campaign.
Trump is now the oldest presidential candidate in American history, and she is offering an optimistic, visionary message in contrast to Trump’s frightening claim that the country faces terminal collapse without her in the White House.
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At the same time, Harris must solve the puzzle of how to debate Trump, who habitually makes false statements on nearly every subject and loves to harass his opponents. Biden, in his only debate against Trump before he drops his candidacy, finds himself completely unprepared.
Already, Trump has been hurling racist and sexist slurs at Harris in his speeches, deliberately mispronouncing her name and calling her “crazy” and a “Marxist.”
“It would take almost superhuman focus and discipline to handle Donald Trump in a debate,” Harris supporter and current Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told CNN.
The Harris campaign announced that after the debate they would be “sweeping the battleground states,” starting with North Carolina, then Pennsylvania.
Trump held a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday, where he appealed to his mostly white, working-class base with a negative speech in which he claimed he was fighting against an “evil regime” where Democrats have “imported murderers, child predators and serial rapists from all over the world.”
On his Truth Social platform, he warned that once he was back in the White House, he would impose “long prison sentences” on anyone planning to “cheat” in November.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)