Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will meet face to face for the first time on Tuesday as they take the stage for the US presidential debate.
Harris has upended the race since she replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket in July, revitalising her party’s campaign.
But while the vice-president is now ahead of Trump by 2.9 percentage points nationally, according to the Financial Times’s poll tracker, her lead has narrowed slightly in recent days, and the presidential race remains extremely tight.
Here are five things to watch for when the candidates meet at 9pm ET in Philadelphia (2am Irish time).
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Who will look more presidential?
The rules on Tuesday will follow a similar format to the Biden-Trump debate, with the candidates’ microphones switched off while the other is speaking and no live studio audience.
Harris and Trump will face questions from ABC anchors Linsey Davis and David Muir, with two minutes to answer and two minutes for rebuttal, with an additional follow-up minute. No prepared notes will be allowed.
The spotlight will shine particularly brightly on Harris, since Trump is better known to voters. “I think the stakes are high for both of them, but more for Harris,” said Hans Noel, a government professor at Georgetown University. “This is the first time we get to see her talk and defend herself directly, talk about policies, respond to Trump’s line of attack, all the rest of it.”
Noel said he would also be watching to see if Trump deployed any new tactics against his opponent. The former president has struggled to adjust to his new rival, relying on personal attacks against Harris, including questioning her racial identity and reposting a sexist social media post.
Who will define Harris?
Both candidates will be trying to do a simple thing during the debate: to define Harris for a voting public that knows much less about her than about Trump.
The former president is still honing effective attack lines against his opponent, but polls released over the weekend show he may finally be blunting her momentum.
Trump has tried to paint Harris as a radical communist and a policy flip-flopper. He has also mocked her mannerisms, calling her “Laughing Kamala”.
The debate “is a very big moment” for Trump that he needs to make the best use of, said Republican strategist Kevin Madden. “He’s going to have 90 minutes to offer a real focused line of attack on Harris ... and that’s going to be better than any 30-second ad that runs 100 times between now and election day.”
The event is even more crucial for Harris. She introduced herself to the public at last month’s Democratic National Convention, but the debate will be an opportunity to tell voters more about her proposals. After criticism that her campaign is relatively light on policy, she will also need to convince voters that her plans are substantive.
Will Harris the prosecutor go after Trump the felon?
Harris has made her experience as a prosecutor a central part of her political identity, and has been more willing than Biden to go after Trump on the campaign trail for his criminal convictions.
“I know Donald Trump’s type,” Harris said in her DNC address. “I have been dealing with people like him my entire career.” She has energised crowds by contrasting her time going after “predators” and “fraudsters” with the former president’s court appearances and legal woes.
Trump, fresh from a legal victory after the sentencing in his “hush money” case was delayed until after the election, in turn has accused Harris of being a “radical” prosecutor and “weak-on-crime district attorney”, and is likely to repeat the charges during the debate.
Whose economic vision will resonate?
The economy remains voters’ top concern as high prices continue to weigh on their finances.
Harris and Trump will lay out their competing economic visions for how to bring down the country’s high cost of living.
Trump wants to lower taxes, beyond extending the cuts he passed in 2017, boost energy production, slash government spending and enlist Elon Musk to pursue aggressive deregulation. He is also planning to impose sweeping tariffs on imports in a revival of his “America first” economic agenda.
Harris, on the other hand, wants to raise taxes on wealthy earners and large corporations to widen the social safety net and give child care tax credits and tax benefits to small business owners. She also wants to crack down on price gouging, although she has not offered many details, raising concern about price controls among some economists.
Trump is expected to keep blaming the Biden administration for the high cost of living, while Harris will emphasise falling inflation and the millions of jobs created while she and Biden have been in office.
For most of this year, voters have said they trust Trump more with the economy, but last month an FT-Michigan Ross poll showed that this had changed, with more of them trusting Harris on the issue.
Who will be stronger on the flashpoints of immigration and abortion?
Harris and Trump will be trying to capitalise on their positions on two totemic issues for US voters: abortion and immigration.
Trump has been on the defensive on abortion rights and is struggling to define his position as he attempts to balance the strongly held views of the religious anti-abortion voters who form a core of his base without alienating moderate and independent voters who tend to support reproductive rights.
Harris, who has campaigned strongly for reproductive rights, will try to link the former president to the 2022 overturning of Roe vs Wade by the Supreme Court, a move made possible by the appointment of three conservative justices during Trump’s presidency.
The ex-president, meanwhile, will seek to hammer the Biden administration for an influx of migrants across the US-Mexico border under its watch. He will also try to focus the blame on Harris, who was tasked by the president with addressing the root causes of migration from Latin America.
Republican strategist Doug Heye said “if [Trump] can be focused” when Harris says she will do something on any topic, including border security, all he “has to say is, ‘you’ve been there for three and a half years – why haven’t you done anything yet?’” – Financial Times