No poll manages to decide between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump: two days before the election, never has the outcome of a presidential duel in the United States been so unpredictable, between two candidates who are completely opposed.
And it is because the election promises to be very close, because it will probably be decided by a few tens of thousands of votes in one or other of the highly contested states, that the former Republican president poses already the milestones for a challenge in the event of defeat.
“They are trying hard to steal” the election, he claimed, wearing his traditional red cap, during a rally in North Carolina on Sunday, already questioning the reliability of the vote count.
The world is waiting to know if America will open the doors of the White House for the first time to a woman, Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. Or if she is going to send Donald Trump back there, at the end of a campaign full of convulsions.
More than 76 million Americans have already voted, early or by mail. On Tuesday, when the polling stations of the world’s leading power close, a period of feverish waiting will begin. No one knows whether it will take hours or days for the American media, whose prerogative it is traditionally, to attribute victory to one or the other.
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The latest New York Times/Siena poll, focused on seven crucial states, gives Kamala Harris in the lead in a majority of them (in Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin), and tied with Donald Trump in two others (Pennsylvania and Michigan), while his rival is ahead of him in Arizona.
In any case, the difference is tiny, making any conclusion impossible.
The Democratic candidate is campaigning in the center and counting on the defense of the right to abortion to mobilize women en masse.
Donald Trump, far from targeting moderate voters, is deploying ever more violent rhetoric.
On Sunday, referring to the protective device deployed around him after two assassination attempts, he said that to reach him, “you would have to shoot through” the journalists, adding: “It doesn’t bother me that much.” »
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As D-day approaches, the two rivals, who spend hundreds of millions of dollars each, are trying to occupy the field and saturate the media space.
On Saturday, Kamala Harris engaged in a self-deprecating exercise on the comedy show “Saturday Night Live”.
The vice-president, a former California prosecutor born 60 years ago to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, suddenly entered the campaign in July after the resounding withdrawal of Joe Biden, 81 years old.
On Sunday, she returns to Michigan, an industrial hub state on the shores of the Great Lakes, where she must convince a blue-collar electorate.
She should still call for “turning the page on a decade with Donald Trump”, a New York real estate billionaire, elected president to everyone’s surprise in 2016, and who has shaken up American democracy as much as international relations.
Kamala Harris portrays him as a “fascist” with a “vengeful” spirit.
The populist tribune, on whom the legal convictions and indictments seem to slide, has turned to open insults, saying of his rival that she is “dumb as her feet”.
He presents himself as a providential man for a United States threatened by an economic cataclysm and “invaded” by millions of “murderous” illegal immigrants.
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The voting system in the United States, a federal country, is complex. The presidency is awarded by indirect universal suffrage: Americans vote for a college of 538 electors, distributed among the 50 states, without the total votes at national level being decisive.
A large majority of these states are already considered to be either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. This is why the candidates’ efforts and the suspense focus on the seven “swing states”.
The former president has never acknowledged his defeat in November 2020. He is facing criminal charges for his role in the assault by his supporters against the Capitol, the seat of Congress in Washington, on January 6, 2021.
Challenge (with AFP)
