It will, inevitably, be a historic result: America decides on Tuesday whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will enter the White House, at the end of a campaign of incredible tension, undecided until the last minute.
Polling stations open at 6 a.m. local time on the east coast of the United States (11 a.m. GMT) and millions of people will add their votes to the more than 80 million ballots already cast early or sent by post.
It is impossible to know whether it will take hours or days of counting to decide between the 60-year-old Democratic vice-president and the 78-year-old former Republican leader, whose personalities and visions could not be more different.
Two apparently irreconcilable Americas have flocked to their meetings in recent weeks, each camp convinced that the other will lead the country to disaster.
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“If she doesn’t win, we’re screwed. Totally. Donald Trump is going to ruin everything. It is out of control,” worries Robin Matthews, a 50-year-old association leader who came to listen to Kamala Harris on Monday evening in Philadelphia.
But for Ruth McDowell, Trump “is the one who will save this country”. This 65-year-old administrative assistant, who came to attend the Republican’s last meeting in Michigan, assures that she will be “very sad for (her) grandchildren” if the vice-president wins.
Kamala Harris called her rival a “fascist”. Donald Trump insisted that she was “dumb as hell” and that she was going to “destroy” the country.
Tuesday at midnight, Dixville Notch, a hamlet lost in the forests of New Hampshire on the northeastern border of the United States with Canada, traditionally launched the vote. Like the polls, its six voters were unable to decide between the two candidates: three votes each.
The verdict at the polls will be historic in any case.
Either America will send a woman to the White House for the first time. Either it will send back the populist tribune, criminally convicted and targeted by numerous prosecutions, whose first term (2017-2021) had dragged the country and the entire world into an uninterrupted series of convulsions.
The latest polls give the two adversaries almost tied in the seven crucial states, those which, in this indirect vote, will give the Democrat or the Republican the sufficient number of electors to reach the threshold of 270 out of 538, synonymous with victory.
To try to convince in just three months of campaigning, Kamala Harris focused on a message of protection of democracy and the right to abortion, aimed at women and moderate Republicans.
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The Democrat, born to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, is organizing her election night at her former university, the historically black Howard institution, in Washington.
Donald Trump will be in Palm Beach, Florida, his state of residence.
In this campaign, the billionaire replayed the same score as in 2016 and 2020, presenting himself as an anti-system candidate close to the people, the only one capable of saving a country ravaged according to him by migrants and galloping inflation.
Tuesday concludes a stunning race, marked by the abrupt entry into the running of the vice-president in July, replacing aging President Joe Biden, and by two assassination attempts against the former Republican president, four times indicted criminally.
What happens next remains a big unknown.
Both camps have already initiated dozens of legal actions, while two out of three Americans fear an eruption of violence after the election.
Some polling stations have turned into fortresses, monitored by drones and with snipers on the roofs.
Electoral officials also underwent training to learn how to barricade themselves in a room or use a fire hose to repel possible intruders.
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In the federal capital Washington, metal barriers surround the White House, the Capitol and other sensitive sites. An impressive number of downtown stores have covered their windows with wooden planks.
The images of January 6, 2021, when Trumpists attacked the seat of the American Congress, remain in everyone’s minds.
Nothing says that the country will be shaken by similar violence.
Donald Trump, however, has already laid the first stones of a new protest, accusing the Democrats at meeting after meeting of “cheating like hell”.
And the Democratic camp said it “expected” the Republican to declare himself the winner prematurely, as he did in 2020.
Challenge (with AFP)
