Down to the wire: Trump, Harris in final week push

WASHINGTON, United States — Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will make a final push to break their bitter deadlock as they head into the last week of the most dramatic and divisive White House race in modern times.

Despite a series of historic upheavals in a US election like no other, polls show the Democratic vice president and Republican former president remain neck-and-neck in the polls as Election Day on November 5 looms.

Both will pull out all the stops to sway voters, with Harris, 60, giving her closing pitch on Tuesday at the same spot where Trump rallied supporters to protest his election 2020 loss before the deadly January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol.

Trump, 78, is also relying on spectacle, and he gave a barnstorming rally at the famed Madison Square Garden arena in his home city of New York on Sunday night to kick off his final effort.

As the race goes down to the wire, the two rivals will hammer the seven battleground states where just a few thousand voters could decide who governs the world's top superpower.

"It's looking like a toss-up," John Mark Hansen, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, told AFP.

A deeply divided United States will make history either way: by electing its first woman president, or by granting Trump a sensational comeback and putting the first convicted felon and oldest ever commander-in-chief into the Oval Office.

The choice reflects the starkly different visions offered by Harris, the first female, Black and South Asian vice president, and billionaire tycoon Trump.

Harris at first focused on a message of joy and positivity after her shock replacement of President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket in July, but has since switched to a relentless focus on Trump as a "fascist" who threatens democracy and women's reproductive rights.

The Democrat has pointedly chosen the Ellipse on the National Mall in Washington for her rally exactly a week before Election Day as it is where Trump spoke to supporters to deny his 2020 election defeat by Biden, shortly before they stormed the Capitol.

"This is a very crucial time in history," supporter Kimberly Whittaker said at a Harris rally in Kalamazoo in the