With hours to go until Election Day, both presidential candidates and their star campaigners were engaged in hectic campaigning across battleground States , with Democratic candidate Joe Biden leading U.S. President Donald Trump in key States and nationally. The messaging and campaign style of both camps reflected a deeply polarised electorate and the candidates’ contrasting approaches to the coronavirus pandemic, which continues to rage across the country.
Mr. Biden and former President Barack Obama made their first joint campaign appearance in Michigan on Saturday with Biden events scheduled in Philadelphia for Sunday. Mr. Trump held four campaign rallies on Saturday in Pennsylvania alone and had a hectic schedule on Sunday with rallies in Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
An unprecedented 90 million Americans or 43% of all registered voters had voted early or by mail by the end of Saturday with over 50 million using postal ballots.
Popular vote
Going into the elections, national polls, which are indicative of how the popular vote will go, showed Mr. Biden with an average lead of 7.2 percentage points as per polling aggregator Real Clear Politics.
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Both campaigns have their eyes on Pennsylvania with its potential harvest of 20 Electoral College votes. Mr. Trump won the State narrowly in 2016, but Mr. Biden is leading in polling by an average of 4 percentage points in recent polls. [State polls, on the whole, got it wrong in 2016. While pollsters say they have corrected for deficiencies of the past, 2020 is unique in several respects — such as the unprecedented levels of early voting — and there may be new factors impacting the predictive power of pre-election polling this year].
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“Hello Pennsylvania. Let’s go Pennsylvania. We have to do the same thing we did four years ago,” Mr. Trump told supporters at a rally in Butler — Mr. Trump won Butler County by a large margin in 2016.
In the final days of the campaign, Mr. Trump has talked about his economic record, portraying the elections as a choice between a “Trump super recovery” and a “Biden depression”. Mr. Trump has claimed to voters that Mr. Biden will “quadruple” their taxes and “ship your [their] jobs to China”. Mr. Trump also has made allegations of corruption against the Biden family, especially his son, Hunter Biden. Mr. Trump has also misrepresented the Biden-Harris position against fracking and fossil fuels. He has also questioned Mr. Biden’s mental acuity.
A boy dressed in the colors of the U.S. flag waits for the start of a campaign drive-in, get-out-the-vote event with Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Joe Biden and former U.S. President Barack Obama in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., October 31, 2020. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Mr. Trump, who has an unconventional campaigning style, has also sought to remind voters that he is a Washington outsider. “If I don’t sound like a typical Washington politician, it’s because I’m not,” he said in Montrousville, Pennsylvania, on Saturday.
Under a Biden presidency, the country would be plunged into chaos, Mr. Trump has said, seeking to portray Mr. Biden as a puppet of the “radical left”. Mr. Trump called Mr. Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris, the most liberal Senator in the U.S.
“Kamala, Kamala Harris. You have to pronounce her name exactly right, or she gets very upset with you,” Mr. Trump said on Saturday about the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, who is of Indian and Jamaican descent.
Ms. Harris campaigned in Miami-Dade county on Saturday. The winner of Florida has won the presidency in the last six elections. Mr. Trump won the State by 1.2 percentage points in 2016 and Mr. Biden currently leads the State.
Ms. Harris focussed on the Trump administration’s mishandling of the coronavirus, racial injustice, the state of the economy and the climate crisis during her remarks.
Mr. Biden made his first joint appearance of the campaign with Mr. Obama in Flint, Michigan, as they scrambled to boost turnout in the State.
Obama on Trump
A poll worker helping a woman do paperwork as voters wait in lines to cast their ballots in Duluth, Georgia.
Speaking in Flint and Detroit, Mr. Obama said 140,000 American lives would have been saved if the President had taken an approach to the pandemic similar to Canada's. “This is not a contest of just calling each other names,” Mr. Obama said. “This isn't a sporting event. This is life or death.”
Mr. Biden said “we're done with the chaos, the tweets, the anger, the failure, the refusal to take any responsibility.”
Local governments and private citizens prepared for voter intimidation and possible violence on Tuesday and after. In downtown Washington DC, construction teams were seen boarding up the ground floors of several glass buildings.
The President has sought to portray all protests in connection with police brutality against African Americans and racial justice violent. While some protests had indeed turned violent and while there has been looting in cities, the majority of Black Lives Matter protests have been peaceful. The President’s own rhetoric and his failure to quickly and unequivocally condemn white supremacism has also — as per their public reactions — motivated the actions of at least some of these groups.
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In Portland Oregon, armed right wing groups plan to show up at ballot drop-off boxes and extreme left-wing organisers plan to be there too, the Washington Post reported. In October, members of a right-wing militia group were charged in connection to a plot to kidnap Michigan’s Democrat governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Democrats accused a group of Republican vehicles of attempting to run a Biden-Harris bus off the road in Texas on Friday. Mr Trump tweeted a video of the vehicles and the bus saying, “I LOVE TEXAS!”
Fifty-three percent of registered voters were “very” or “somewhat” worried about violence from militia groups as per a poll.
