WASHINGTON DC: U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate in the November election, and her Republican challenger, former President Donald Trump, agreed Thursday to a high-stakes, prime-time television debate September 10 on ABC News.
NBC News is discussing a potential second debate with both campaigns.
Meanwhile, Trump said at a lengthy news conference that CBS News had agreed to host a vice presidential debate between his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, and Harris’ ticket mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
Trump said he had also accepted a September 4 debate date on Fox News, where an array of conservative commentators favor his election, but the Harris campaign has not agreed.
The Harris-Trump face-off that was agreed to is likely to be one of the pivotal moments of the campaign leading to the November 5 election.
It almost certainly will be watched by millions of voters, at least a small sliver of whom may not have already decided whom to vote for.
Pollsters show the contest is currently a virtual dead heat, with Harris perhaps edging ahead.
Biden-Trump debate
One debate — between Trump and President Joe Biden — has already played a key role in the election of a new president for a four-year term in the White House starting next January.
Biden, 81, stumbled badly in his June 27 debate with Trump, often losing his train of thought and unable to either sustain an attack on Trump or defend his own 3½ years in office.
With falling polling numbers and pressure from fellow Democrats to withdraw from the campaign, Biden ended his reelection effort July 21 and immediately endorsed Harris, 59. If elected, she would be the country’s first female chief executive, its second Black president after Barack Obama, and the first person of Indian descent to lead the country.
Biden trailed Trump in national surveys by 5 or 6 percentage points when he dropped out of the contest, but Democrats have quickly rallied to Harris’ side.
She has edged ahead of Trump by a percentage point or two in numerous surveys across the country but still trails him in some political battleground states that are likely to determine the national outcome.
Trump answered 37 questions Thursday afternoon at a 65-minute news conference at his oceanside Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
It was a session intended as a put-down of Harris and her failure to hold a full-scale question-and-answer session with reporters in the 18 days since Biden ended his campaign.
Trump, 78, relentlessly disparaged Harris, attacked her as an intellectual lightweight, described her as “a radical left person” out of touch with mainstream voters and repeatedly mispronounced her first name as “Kuh-mahl-uh,” instead of the correct “Comma-la.”
“She can’t do an interview, she’s barely competent,” Trump claimed. “She’s not smart enough to do a news conference.”
He described her as “worse than Biden and not as smart,” but said later, “It’s not really about her. It’s her bad policies.”
(VOA)
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