A billion dollars has already been spent in this Presidential election year, an astonishing figure made doubly so because the campaign didn’t start in earnest until this week. Labor Day - the first Monday of September - is traditionally considered the opening day of  the campaign. It’s time to take stock and chart the road to victory ahead.

For Donald Trump, his campaign strategists are hoping to dial down the insults  and present the most defiantly  revolutionary candidate in modern American political history as a quieter, unrecognizable version of the man  he has shown himself to be. Good luck with that, says none other than Donald Trump, who has taken to complaining to his rally crowds about these attempts to shut him up. “They (campaign strategists)  say to me, ‘Sir please stick to policy, don’t stick to personality. You should be nice to people, sir. I call them up, my geniuses, and say, ‘They are knocking the hell out of me and you say I shouldn’t get personal’. But I am going to do my best.”

To the surprise of no-one, the candidate’s  best has fallen short (an understatement) of his strategists’  hopes in recent days as he posted a series of memes on his social media feed that makes crude and misogynistic remarks about Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton and portray his political opponents as criminals in orange jumpsuits.

The Harris campaign, and the candidate herself, has declined to engage with Trump’s insults. “Same tired old playbook,’’ she told CNN in her first sit down television interview since the Democratic convention. “Next question.”

Instead, Harris and her running mate Tim Walz have further embraced the “joy” message they established at the Chicago convention as they embarked on tours of Georgia, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, all marginal states, over the last week. The vice-President emphasised policy in her public appearances and pushed back on one supporter who told her “He (Trump) is going to jail.  “Well, the courts will handle that and we will handle November. How about that?”  she said. “But we’re not going back.”

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It is hard to imagine candidates, and two campaigns, so diametrically opposed in their ethos. As Mike Murphy, a legendary GOP strategist said: It’s Lord Voldmort versus Ted Lasso. Future historians will debate the strategists’ reasoning and methodology but in this febrile moment the only future that matters will be made on election day, November 5. And the only question anyone wants answered right now is “Who will win?”

For what it is worth, the so-called “Nostradamus of American elections”, historian Allan Lichtman has correctly predicted the winner of every election since 1984 based on his “13 keys to the White House” model and last night he declared  Harris has ticked the boxes he considers most important.

“The keys absolutely will work. They are the constant northern star of political prediction,” Lichtman said ““Kamala Harris will be the next president of the United States — at least that’s my prediction for this race, but the outcome is up to you, so get out and vote,”

Lichtman was wise to include that caveat. The truth is no-one, not even Nostradamus on his best day, knows what the outcome will be. Supporters on both sides can scarcely believe that their preferred candidate isn’t miles in front, an indicator of the  chasm that has opened up between the two American tribes over the last decade or so, and of the closeness of the race.

In the late spring and into the summer Trump had opened up a comfortable gap on his then opponent Joe Biden. That disappeared when the President announced he would not be seeking a second term and endorsed his vice-president, Harris. A triumph Democratic party convention saw Harris move ahead decisively in the polls. Momentarily, she looked like an inevitable winner.

Donald TrumpDonald Trump (Image: Jane Barlow/PA Wire)

That moment is over. The polls have settled down, and the tribes have retrenched. There are a dozen polls published on a daily basis and countless competing poll averages trying to make sense of the information overload. But the small number of observers prepared to acknowledge the existence of  a credible consensus, it looks like Harris is marginally ahead. The 538 election website, which has earned a good reputation for impartiality and accuracy over recent election cycles, gives Harris a 3.5% lead in the popular vote, which translates into a 56% chance of winning the electoral college vote.

Amid all of this uncertainty and dispute, there is universal  agreement on just one thing - next Tuesday’s televised debate in Philadelphia has taken on huge significance. Biden’s campaign effectively ended after his disastrous performance in his June debate against Trump. Don’t expect that level of drama this time round. Harris has proven herself in the past to be an excellent debater. Trump, an objectively terrible debater, could lose the power of speech on Tuesday and still declare himself the winner. Neither will be abandoning the campaign at this late stage.

In all likelihood, Harris will “win” the night, at least in the technical sense. She  will have a firmer grasp on policy details and will pick apart Trump’s well-documented misbehavior with her prosecutor’s skill. Trump will throw haymakers and hope that one lands.

When it's over, the spin room will get to work and present the version of what happened that suits them best - my candidate won.

Of course they did. Unless they didn’t.

The irony is it might not matter.  “Debates, historically, don’t move needles,” Leslie Marshall, a Democratic strategist and Fox News contributor, told McClatchy News. “If it were up to who won debates, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton would have been president.”