Now yes the american election campaign has entered the final stages. After Tuesday's heated debate in Philadelphia between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, both parties are adjusting their strategies for the 54-day final stretch, in which the fight for the lead is set to be a deadly one. Democrats want to continue this momentum that they receive after their candidate's good performance. The Republicans intend to correct the bad taste left by their interventions.
As time passes, opportunities to capture new votes — or avoid losing them — are becoming increasingly scarce. In some states, such as Alabama, the deadline for mail-in voting has already passed. In Pennsylvania, ballots can begin to be cast as early as Monday. Other states will follow suit in the coming days.
Unless both parties accept a second debate In the coming weeks, something that is not yet clear will happen, with only one other major national event scheduled before November 5: the October 1 debate between the vice presidential candidates, Democrat Tim Walz and Republican J.D. Vance. But historically, rhetorical duels between number twos do not usually tip the scales; his television audience is much smaller than that of his bosses.
Visit to the pivotal states
Democrats were quick to act. After appearing alongside President Joe Biden on Wednesday at a series of events honoring the victims of the 9/11 attacks, Harris plans to return to the campaign trail and hold a series of rallies in swing states, the ones that hold the key to a tiebreaker. At the New York event, the vice president met with her opponent again, shaking hands for the second time in two days.
On Thursday, he will visit two towns in North Carolina, the start of a new tour “to generate more support, to build enthusiasm and to reach the voters who will decide this election, as we approach the final weeks of the campaign,” the vice president's campaign team said. On Friday, Harris will hold a rally in Wilkes-Barre, an industrial city in northeastern Pennsylvania.
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There, he will court white working-class voters, a bloc that resists him and in which Trump has enormous sympathies. Harris must win votes from this group, which makes up a significant proportion of the total in Pennsylvania. The state is vital to her White House aspirations: it provides the most votes, 19, in the US Electoral College (270 are needed to win). Without it, your chances of winning are greatly diminished.
Immediately after the debate, Harris was jubilant. In a surprise appearance at a rally in Philadelphia, he called it a “great night.” The vice president, who a CNN flash poll had declared the winner of the debate by 63 percent to her rival’s 37 percent, also got the cherry on top: American music idol Taylor Swift announced that she would vote in November.
Trump, for his part, has tried to limit the damage After a debate in which he spread the hoax that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors' pets in Ohio, he said he had “an idea for a plan” to change Barack Obama's current health insurance system, without giving further details. He became angry when his rival questioned surveillance figures from his campaign rallies. He also said Harris wanted to conduct “sex-change operations on illegal immigrants in prison.”
“We had a great night. We won the debate. “We had a terrible, terrible network,” he lamented Wednesday in an appearance on his favorite network, Fox News, in which, as he did immediately after his rhetorical clash with Harris, he criticized the network’s moderators for setting up ABC News for his poor performance. “They should be ashamed of themselves. They corrected me all the time, even though what I said was fundamentally correct, or I hope it was correct.
But even as time runs out, there are still eight weeks to go, and neither side can afford to slow down. Harris herself reiterated Tuesday night that Democrats are still not the frontrunners. Republicans need to send a message of calm to their bases. It is unclear whether, despite the expectations raised, the debate served to shift the minds of those who had already decided how to vote, or to motivate the 8% of undecided people which are still unclear, according to investigations.
To find out, we’ll have to wait for the polls in the coming days. Harris needs to improve: The latest polls suggest that the momentum she built throughout the summer after replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee has stalled. According to an ABC News poll conducted before the debate, 28% of voters said they didn’t know enough about the vice president’s positions. Other polls indicate that her support among traditionally Democratic blocs, such as African Americans and young people, has increased from what Biden received in the months before he dropped out of reelection, but it still falls short of the support she received as president in the 2020 election.
“Harris’ strong debate performance doesn’t change the fundamentals of this presidential campaign,” said Amy Walters, director of the respected political analyst firm Cook Report. “Trump’s inability to effectively define on the debate stage what’s at stake in a Harris presidency can be offset by effective advertising and appropriate targeting of voter groups.”
But the analyst adds a nuance: “Despite everything, Harris has shown that she can do what Biden has failed to do: turn this election into a referendum on Trump.”