US presidential nominees Kamala Harris and Donald Trump faced off in an occasionally fiery debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday evening, with the November election still on a knife-edge.

Separated in opinion polls by the barest of margins, the candidates stayed true to their expected strategies. Democratic candidate Harris attempted to provoke Trump, while suggesting that what she called his divisive rhetoric had no bearing on Americans' real concerns.

"Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people," she said, in one of the evening's more memorable lines. "And clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that."

Her Republican counterpart, meanwhile, hammered his favorite issues — inflation and undocumented migrants, even when they were not the subject of the question — and repeated several outlandish, debunked claims, including that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating family pets — a claim that has made the rounds on social media, amplified by Trump's running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance.

"We have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums, and they're coming in, and they're taking jobs that are occupied right now by African Americans and Hispanics and also unions," the former president claimed.

Vice President Harris took several opportunities to bring up what has become her new campaign slogan — "We're not going back" — and did all she could to offer Americans an optimistic vision, in contrast to what she painted as Trump's backward-looking, negative vision of the state of the US.

"In a normal world, there would be hardly any question: Kamala Harris would be the clear winner of this debate," said Ines Pohl, DW's Washington bureau chief. "She presented herself as in charge, confident, well-informed and capable of leading this country into a brighter future. Donald Trump, on the other hand, was put on the defensive by her;........

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