The Democrat Kamala Harris and the Republican Donald Trump spent the weekend barnstorming swing states, aware that opinion polls showed them running neck-and-neck in the race for the White House. Analysts are predicting the closest election since 2000, when George W. Bush prevailed by 537 votes, and warning of the threat of civil unrest and political violence.
"This time, I venture to say, is a real Armageddon election," John Zogby, an author and pollster, told reporters at the Foreign Press Centers in Washington. "Honestly, I'm not entirely sure that elements of either side of the electorate are willing to accept the results if their candidate does not win."
The contest is also being watched intently around the world, with victory for Harris likely to represent a continuation of U.S. foreign policy norms but a win for Trump threatening to upend them. The outcome could have profound implications for wars in Gaza and Ukraine as well as the climate crisis.
Harris has been joined by independents and former Republicans in warning that US democracy itself is on the line. They have sought to remind the electorate that it was only four years ago when Trump instigated a coup against his own government, on 6 January 2021, in a desperate bid to cling to power.
Mark Milley, a former chair of the joint chiefs of staff, has described Trump as "a fascist to the core".
John Kelly, Trump's chief of staff at the White House, has told how the president spoke admiringly of Adolf Hitler's generals.
Trump has, if anything, reinforced the point in recent weeks by making ominous comments about "the enemy from within", threatening to deploy the military domestically and staging a bigotry-filled rally in New York's Madison Square Garden that echoed a Nazi one held there in 1939.
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