2024 showdown: What happens next in the Kamala Harris-Donald Trump face-off

Vice President Kamala Harris, urged her supporters to ‘get out there, let’s fight for it,’ as she concluded her presidential nomination acceptance speech at this week’s Democratic National Convention.

With both major party national nominating conventions now in the books, the 2024 edition of the race for the White House enters the final sprint.

Both Harris and former President Trump, the Republican Party’s nominee, will be back on the campaign trail in the upcoming week, along with their running mates, making stops across some of the seven crucial battleground states that will likely determine the outcome of the November election.

It’s a process that will be repeated each and every week until Election Day.

The former president, his running mate Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, and their campaign and allied Republicans have repeatedly criticized Harris for not holding a major news conference or sitting for an interview since replacing Biden atop their party’s 2024 ticket over a month ago.

So all eyes will be on Harris to see if she lives up to her promise to do a national news media interview in the week left in the month of August.

There’s just one week left in August, and the end of the month will bring anticipation of the latest fundraising figures from both the Trump and Harris campaigns.

President Biden enjoyed the fundraising lead over Trump earlier this year, but the former president saw his fundraising soar in the late spring and early summer.

But after Biden’s blockbuster move to end his re-election bid and Harris replacing him as the Democrats’ standard-bearer, the campaign and the party’s fundraising surged and Harris walloped Trump in fundraising during July. 

The August numbers, which the campaigns could release as early as September 1, will be closely watched and scrutinized, as fundraising along with polling is a crucial metric.

The first and possibly the only presidential debate between Harris and Trump is scheduled for Sept. 10 in Philadelphia.

The face-off could be the most important evening in the 2024 presidential election, with the power to potentially shift or transform the current margin-of-error race between the vice president and the former president.

Need proof – just look back to the late June debate between Biden and Trump. The president’s disastrous performance fueled questions about whether the 81-year-old president had the mental and physical stamina to handle another four years in the White House. And it sparked calls from within his own party for Biden to drop out of the race. 

Less than a month after the clash in Atlanta, the president was out of the race.

There are 73 days to go until Election Day, but some voters will start casting ballots next month. 

In swing state North Carolina, mail-in voting begins on Sept. 6. And early voting begins on Sept. 16 in Pennsylvania and Sept. 26 in Michigan, two other crucial electoral battlegrounds.