Polls open in US in knife-edge election

US Election Day voting begins in earnest after an extraordinary — and for many unnerving — presidential race that will either make Kamala Harris the first woman president in the country’s history or hand Donald Trump a comeback that sends shock waves around the world.

As the first polling stations opened, Democratic vice president Harris, 60, and Republican former president Trump, 78, were dead-even in the tightest and most volatile White House contest of modern times.

Harris has promised to work across the aisle to tackle economic worries and other issues without radically departing from the course set by President Joe Biden. Trump, the Republican former president, has vowed to replace thousands of federal workers with loyalists, impose sweeping tariffs on allies and foes alike, and stage the largest deportation operation in US history.

The bitter rivals spent their final day of the campaign frenetically working to get their supporters out to the polls and trying to win over any last undecided voters in the swing states expected to decide the outcome.

But despite a series of head-spinning twists in the campaign — from Harris’s dramatic entrance when President Joe Biden dropped out in July, to Trump riding out two assassination attempts and a criminal conviction — nothing has broken the deadlock in the opinion polls.