With less than 50 days to go before America begins voting for a new president, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will finally face each other one-on-one in the first presidential debate of the 2016 election cycle at 6:00 am on Tuesday morning.
The debate is of significance as it comes at a time when general election polls and other opinion polls have come closer, and some have acknowledged the possibility of a Trump presidency.
A series of polls show Clinton slowly losing her national advantage against her Republican rival. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll puts the Democratic nominee a mere two points ahead of Trump, 46% to 44%.
Where and When
The first presidential debate will begin live broadcast at 6:00 am IST from Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. Divided into six 15-minute segments, the debate will be hosted by NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt. Each segment will focus on a major topic chosen by Holt. Each candidate will have two minutes to respond to questions and then additional time to respond to the other candidate's response.
How to Watch
The debate will be streamed online. Facebook will stream ABC News' live coverage, while YouTube will have the live streams of PBS, Telemundo and the Washington Post. Twitter is also set to stream Bloomberg TV's coverage on debates.twitter.com. The following websites will also include debate live streams: ABC News, BuzzFeed News, CBS News, CNN, C-SPAN, Daily Caller, Fox News, Hulu, Huffington Post, NBC News, PBS, Politico, Telemundo, Wall Street Journal, Univision and Yahoo.
Snapchat will feature coverage of the debates via a Live Story. Meanwhile, NBC News has joined forces with AllspiceVR for a live virtual-reality 360 view of the debate. It can be accessed on Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR and HTC Vive headsets.
Schedule for the next three debates
• The second presidential debate is scheduled for 9 October at Washington University, in St Louis, Missouri. The town-meeting will be moderated by ABC News' Martha Radiate and CNN's Anderson Cooper.
• The final debate will air on 19 October at UNLV in Las Vegas, Nevada and will be moderated by Fox News' Chris Wallace.
• The vice presidential debate between Mike Pence and Tim Kaine will occur on 4 October at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia and will be moderated by CBS News correspondent and CBSN anchor Elaine Quijano.
