Millions of American voters will go to the polls Tuesday to choose between President Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden in a historic presidential election in America amid deep division.

Biden, 77, hopes that he will finally win the presidency on his third attempt.

Trump, the outgoing 74-year-old Republican president, who fought an unprecedented campaign in terms of intensity, armed with his strong energy to go to voters on the street, promises to achieve a surprise, as happened in 2016.

"Tomorrow we will make history again," he said, addressing a large crowd of supporters Monday night at a gathering in Grand Rapids, Michigan, expecting "another great victory."

Biden said hours before that in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he launched his election campaign 18 months ago, "I have a feeling that we will achieve a huge victory together tomorrow," stressing that if he is elected president of the United States, he will seek "to control Covid from the first day." For taking over the keys to the White House.

The spread of the Covid-19 epidemic has overwhelmed the election campaign after it killed more than 230,000 people in the United States and worsened in recent days.

- "No additional four years" -

"I will not bear four more years of Trump's era," one of Joe Biden's advocates, Jayne Perry, 65, told AFP in Pittsburgh, where the former US vice president held a campaign rally Monday evening in the presence of singer Lady Gaga.

On the other hand, Lara Schmidt, 42, hopes the president will achieve a landslide victory. "But if votes are cast by illegal mail, I will pray," she says, expressing concern after hearing him in Scranton.

As some cities prepare for the possibility of violence, America gives an image to the world that it is a country divided into two blocs that no longer communicate.

For months, Trump, speaking of catastrophic scenarios, waved the specter of a "radical left", which, according to him, is ready to transform the world's largest power into something resembling "Venezuela on a large scale."

Democrats, led by Joe Biden and Barack Obama, are intensifying their warnings of the consequences that could be devastating for democratic institutions if Trump wins a second term.

About a hundred million Americans voted in early voting, either in person or by mail, to avoid crowding at polling stations amid the spread of the Covid-19 epidemic. For weeks, Donald Trump has criticized this option, saying it encourages fraud, but without providing evidence of that.

Five voters cast their ballots in Dixville Notch, a small village of 12 people in the northeastern United States, in a symbolic start to the presidential election by midnight Tuesday, voting unanimously for Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

With its vote in the middle of the night, the village in the New Hampshire woods near the Canadian border follows a tradition since the 1960s that earned it the title of "the first in the country.”

With the exception of the neighboring village of Millsfield, which also votes at night, most polling stations on the eastern coast of the United States open at 6:00 or 7:00 a.m. Tuesday (12:00 GMT).

- Participation is very high -

The voting takes place between two candidates who adopt completely different approaches.

On the one hand, there is the former American billionaire, the real estate mogul who moved from presenting a reality TV program to storming the political arena with a populist message based on "America first" and still insisting that he is "an outsider" to politics even though he spent four years in the White House.

On the other hand, there is Biden, a veteran of middle-class politics, who spent 36 years as a senator and then eight years as Vice President Obama, and promises to soothe America's wounds if he wins "the battle for the soul of America."

After two failures in 1988 and 2008, Joe Biden, who belongs to the moderate current in the Democratic Party, imposed himself in the primaries for his camp with a simple message that he defeated Donald Trump, describing him as "the worst president" in modern US history.

The turnout appears to be historic, with more than a hundred million voters casting their votes so far.

Democrats called for massive voting in this way because of the virus, and everyone is waiting to see if Republicans, who tend to vote on the same election day, will be on time at the polls.

This record accumulation of votes through the mail, which may continue to appear in some states for several days after Tuesday, may complicate the vote counting processes or even delay the announcement of the winner if the results are very close.

Donald Trump warned, "Once the election is over, our lawyers will be ready." Trump had refused to pledge to accept the election result, in the unprecedented behavior of an outgoing president.

In order to win, the candidate must obtain the majority of the votes of the largest electorate, which are 270 out of 538, which are awarded proportionally at the state level.

All eyes will be on Tuesday evening Florida, one of the critical states in the elections. Without winning this state, which he won in 2016, the mission would be nearly impossible for Donald Trump to stay in the White House.