Donald Trump has rejected a second debate against Kamala Harris before the November 5 election, saying that it was “too late” with early voting already underway in some states.Earlier in the day, Harris’s campaign said she had accepted an invitation from broadcaster CNN to participate in a debate on October 23.It would have been the candidates’ second debate, after a September 10 encounter that most pundits said she had won.“The American people deserve another opportunity to see Vice-President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump debate before they cast their ballots,” her campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement.“I hope (Trump) will join me,” Harris posted on X.Trump claimed during a campaign rally in the battleground state of North Carolina that he would like to debate – calling it “good entertainment value” – but the start of early voting in some states had taken the air out of the idea.“It’s just too late, voting has already started,” he said.He added, to a large and enthusiastic crowd of supporters, that while CNN had been “very fair” when he debated President Joe Biden in June, “they won’t be fair again”.Harris replaced her boss at the top of the Democratic ticket after the 81-year-old Biden’s disastrous performance against Trump.His exit from the race left Trump, 78, now the oldest ever presidential nominee, against a much younger Harris, 59.Saturday’s announcement came as some states have already begun early voting in what is an agonisingly close race.The result is expected to hinge on seven battleground states, including North Carolina.Trump addressed the crowd in the port city of Wilmington from behind bulletproof glass, following an apparent second assassination attempt against him.A gunman was discovered on his golf course in Florida on September 15, with security agents foiling any plan to harm the former president.In July, Trump was struck on the ear by a bullet at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, after a gunman opened fire from a nearby rooftop.The US Secret Service – tasked with protecting the candidate – admitted on Friday to “deficiencies” and “complacency” in the shocking security breach.Trump won North Carolina in the 2020 election against Biden.However, Harris is aiming to flip the southeastern state for Democrats, on the strength of her support from African Americans and young voters.Trump’s speech on Saturday reinforced the hardline anti-immigrant rhetoric that has become a centrepiece of his campaign, falsely claiming migrants were “attacking villages and cities all throughout the Midwest”.He also promised the crowd that the United States would “reach Mars before the end of my term”.The former president was facing a new challenge in North Carolina after a bombshell report on Thursday revealed that Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor whom Trump has endorsed, had called himself a “Black Nazi” and made other incendiary comments on an adult website message board more than a decade ago.Robinson has denounced the CNN report as “salacious tabloid lies”.The presidential race remains neck-and-neck and every vote will count in the election, whose result Trump has once again refused to say he will accept if he loses.Responding to a question on whether he would run again if he lost, he told US news programme Full Measure: “No, I don’t. I think that that will be, that will be it. I don’t see that at all.”The billionaire did, however, say he hoped to be “successful” at the ballot box on voting day on November 5.Trump faces criminal charges for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 result, after which his supporters violently stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.Meanwhile, an NBC poll released yesterday has Harris leading Trump by five percentage points.Asked about their views of Harris since she became the nominee, 48% of 1,000 registered voters surveyed said it was positive compared to 32% in July – the largest jump among politician ratings polled by NBC since President George W Bush’s favourability rose after the September 11, 2001, attacks.Asked about Trump, 40% of those polled said they viewed him positively compared to 38% in July, the news network said.The poll, conducted on September 13-17, has a margin of error of three percentage points.A separate CBS News poll also found Harris leading Trump, by four percentage points, 52% to 48%, among likely voters, with a margin of error rate of +/-2 percentage points.The findings are broadly in line with other recent national polls, including those by Reuters/Ipsos, that show a close contest heading into the election.While national surveys offer important signals on the views of the electorate, the state-by-state results of the Electoral College determine the winner, with a handful of battleground states likely to be decisive.
