Trump, Biden battle for Florida on same day as race nears end
MIAMI: President Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden were expected to rally voters just hours apart in the Florida city of Tampa, their campaign paths crossing for the first time as the rivals’ fight for the White House enters its frenetic final days.
Florida is a must-win prize, and polls show the candidates in a dead heat in America’s third-largest state, which has sided with the winner in every presidential election since 1964, with one exception.
The candidates’ events yesterday were expected to be a study in contrasts, with Trump’s largely maskless and densely packed supporters gathering in the afternoon and Biden holding a socially distanced drive-in meeting later in the evening.
A day prior, Trump was stumping in Arizona while Biden voted in his home state of Delaware and met with health experts as he fine-tuned his pandemic response plan, seeking to reassure voters that he would use science to fight the contagion.
The virus has killed more than 227,000 people in the United States and forced millions out of work in the world’s largest economy as a resurgent wave of cases was reaching record levels.
“I’m not running on a false promise of being able to end this pandemic by flipping a switch,” said the 77-year-old former vice-president, who has a strong lead in opinion polls.
“But what I can promise you is this: We’ll start on Day One by doing the right thing. We’ll let science guide our decisions.”
Tomorrow, Biden will get some star power when he is joined in Michigan by Barack Obama, whom he served as vice-president.
It will be their first joint in-person appearance of the 2020 race, though Obama has been delivering strategically timed broadsides at Trump throughout.
Trump, by contrast, is finishing his campaign in an extreme test of endurance, with a final attempt to catch up both in swing states and also states that he won in 2016 but now has to defend.
After rallying supporters in three states on Tuesday, Trump, 74, overnighted in a fourth – Nevada – and then flew to Arizona for two more rallies. On an airport tarmac in Bullhead City, Arizona, Trump all but ignored the Covid-19 crisis, and many supporters did not bother with masks as they cheered his defiant insistence on a landslide victory come Nov 3.
“It’s going to be a great, great red wave,” he boomed, referring to the Republican colour.
“We love you! We love you!” the enthusiastic crowd chanted back.
At another rally in Goodyear, Arizona, Trump predicted that he would repeat his 2016 upset, saying: “We’re going to have an even bigger surprise in six days.”