US presidential candidates, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, will debate on television at least once: on September 10, in what promises to be an event that could mark the course of the electoral campaign leading up to the elections next November. Less than ninety days before the date at the polls, both candidates are tied, according to the polls. At this point, any event that can tip the small group of undecided voters in one direction or the other can be of fundamental importance.
A week after saying he would only debate his electoral rival on September 4 on the conservative Fox News channel, Trump announced a change of mind on Thursday. At a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, he proposed a series of three debates in September with Harris. Almost simultaneously, ABC announced that the two candidates had accepted a debate organized by the company on September 10.
In addition to the Fox show on Sept. 4, Trump has suggested a second debate on Sept. 10 on ABC and a third on NBC on Sept. 25. Trump said the dates and broadcasters have already been worked out with TV executives, but the Democratic campaign still needed to give its approval.
The two campaigns had agreed to the debate on September 10 back in May, when President Joe Biden was still the Democratic candidate. That agreement also included the duel on June 20 on CNN. The televised event ended up having historic dimensions: Biden’s intervention – tired, confused and frequently losing the thread of his arguments – was so catastrophic that it ended up forcing him to withdraw from re-election a month later, in favor of Harris.
Last week, Trump had declared the debate on the 10th “finished” in a comment on his social network, Truth, in which he said that he considered the agreement of three months ago null and void because Biden was no longer the candidate. He also claimed that he had a pending defamation lawsuit against the ABC network, which he considers to be biased in favor of the Democrats. He proposed, instead, to hold a face-off on Fox News, with a live audience.
It is not yet clear whether all three debates will take place or just the one on the 10th. Nor under what conditions. The conditions agreed in May stipulated that there should be no audience present in the studios; the candidates would have their microphones muted when they were not speaking, to avoid mutual interruptions.
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The former president’s statement at the time sparked a confrontation between the two campaigns. Harris’s campaign claimed that the vice president would participate in the already agreed debate on ABC and accused her rival of being intimidated by the prospect of facing a former attorney general, who was used to presenting her arguments to an audience in order to convince them. Trump, for his part, also accused his rival of being afraid of facing him on Fox, and maintained that if the confrontation was not held on that network, he would not meet with Harris “at all” for the rest of the electoral race.
The Republican had held his press conference on Thursday as a surprise on his social media. It was the first time he had appeared in public since Harris announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her vice presidential candidate on Tuesday.
Visibly upset, the Republican candidate denied that his Democratic rival had closed the gap in the polls, after months in which Trump was ahead. The polls now point to a technical tie between the two and analysts consider the race completely equal. “We are winning,” insisted the former president, who boasted of having a high voting intention among all segments of the population, except among “black women.”
The press conference also came after Harris and her new number two held a series of introductory rallies in three states, all of which sold out. The Democratic campaign says that each time the attendance was over 10,000 people, and that the most recent one so far, at an airfield in Detroit, was the largest, with 15,000 people participating. On Thursday, after cancelling events in North Carolina and Georgia due to bad weather, they participated in an event to thank the UAW for its support in Michigan, before closing their tour in Arizona on Friday and Nevada on Saturday.
Asked about this, an indignant Trump – since his arrival at the White House in 2017, the participation figures at his events have been one of his great obsessions – boasted of having “the highest attendance numbers in history”, even more than at “the Martin Luther King march”. “68,000 people went to my rally in Alabama,” he said.
“The press says that the Democrats have regained their enthusiasm. No, no. The enthusiasm is with me and with the Republicans,” he repeated on several occasions.
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