Trump, Biden put focus on flipping states
Rallies, church visits mark busy day on campaign trail
LAS VEGAS — President Donald Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden went on offense Sunday, with each campaigning in states they are trying to flip in the Nov. 3 election that is just more than two weeks away.
Trump began his day in Nevada, visiting a church before a fundraiser and an evening rally in Carson City. Once considered a battleground, Nevada has not swung for a Republican presidential contender since 2004.
The rally drew thousands of supporters who sat elbow to elbow, cheering Trump and booing Biden and the press. The vast majority wore no masks to guard against the coronavirus. The president, as he often does, warned that a Biden victory would lead to further lockdowns, and Trump at one point appeared to mock the former vice president for
saying he would listen to scientists.
“If I listened totally to the scientists, we would right now have a country that would be in a massive depression,” Trump said.
Biden, a practicing Catholic, attended Mass in Delaware before campaigning in North Carolina, which last went to a Democratic presidential candidate when Barack Obama won in 2008.
Both candidates are trying to make inroads in states that could help secure a path to victory.
With Trump seated in the front row at the nondenominational International Church of Las Vegas, the senior associate pastor, Denise Goulet, said God told her that the president is the apple of his eye and would secure a second term.
“At 4:30, the Lord said to me, ‘I am going to give your president a second win,’” she said, telling Trump, “You will be the president again.”
Trump offered brief remarks, saying, “I love going to churches” and that it was “a great honor” to attend the service. The president also said that “we have a group on the other side that doesn’t agree with us,” and he urged people to “get out there on Nov. 3 or sooner” to vote. He dropped a wad of $20 bills in the collection plate before leaving.
Trump also attended a fundraiser at the Newport Beach, Calif., home of top GOP donor and tech mogul Palmer Luckey, which raised $12 million for the campaign. The Beach Boys performed.
Biden’s Sunday events, meanwhile, included a virtual discussion with Black faith leaders from around the country.
Biden held up a rosary, which he said he carries in his pocket every day, and described it as “what the Irish call a prisoner’s rosary” since it was small enough to be smuggled into prisons.
“I happen to be a Roman Catholic,” Biden said. “I don’t pray for God to protect me. I pray to God to give me strength to see what other people are dealing with.”
If elected, Biden would be only the second Roman Catholic president in U.S. history and the first since John F. Kennedy. Biden speaks frequently about his faith and its importance in his life.
Biden started his day with Mass in Delaware at St. Joseph’s on the Brandywine, as he does nearly every week. He and his wife, Jill, entered wearing dark-colored masks. She carried a bunch of flowers that included pink roses.
The church is a few minutes’ drive from Biden’s home. Biden’s son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015, is buried in the cemetery on its grounds. Joe and Jill Biden visited the grave after the service.
Trump attends church less often but has drawn strong support from white Evangelical leaders and frequently hosts groups of pastors at the White House. Trump often goes to the Church of Bethesda-By-The Sea near Mar-a-Lago in Florida for major holidays, including Easter, and he attended a Christmas Eve service last year at Family Church in West Palm Beach before the onset of the pandemic.
CAMPAIGN PUSH
At a drive-in rally in Durham, N.C., Biden focused heavily on promoting criminal justice changes to combat institutional racism and promised to help build wealth in the Black community.
He also noted that Trump had said at one of his rallies that the country had turned the corner on the pandemic.
“As my grandfather would say, this guy’s gone around the bend if he thinks we’ve turned the corner. Turning the corner? Things are getting worse,” Biden said.
In addition to public polling that indicates Biden has an edge, the former vice president enjoys another advantage over Trump: money. Over the past four months, his campaign has raised more than $1 billion, and that has enabled him to eclipse Trump’s once-large cash advantage.
That’s become apparent in advertising, where Biden and his Democratic allies are on pace to spend twice as much as Trump and the Republicans in the closing days of the race, according to data from the ad tracking firm Kantar/ CMAG.
Though Trump has pulled back from advertising in Midwestern states that secured his 2016 win, he’s invested heavily elsewhere, including North Carolina, where he is on pace to slightly outspend Biden in the days ahead.
In Nevada, which Trump came close to winning in 2016, Democrats are set to outspend Trump in the closing days by a more than 3-to-1 ratio.
Trump’s visit to the state is part of an aggressive schedule of campaign events ahead of Election Day.
As he tries to win over voters, Trump has sought to paint Democrats as “anti-American radicals” on a “crusade against American history.” He told moderate voters that they had a “a moral duty” to join the Republican Party.
MICHIGAN REMARKS
Trump drew criticism on Sunday for his remarks at a rally Saturday night in Muskegon, Mich., where he demanded that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer reopen the state and then said “lock them all up” after his supporters chanted “lock her up!”
Whitmer said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the rhetoric is “incredibly disturbing,” coming a little more than a week after authorities announced they had thwarted an alleged plot to kidnap the Democratic governor.
“The president is at it again and inspiring and incentivizing and inciting this kind of domestic terrorism,” Whitmer said. “It is wrong. It’s got to end. It is dangerous, not just for me and my family, but for public servants everywhere who are doing their jobs and trying to protect their fellow Americans. People of good will on both sides of the aisle need to step up and call this out and bring the heat down.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” said Trump’s statements were “irresponsible,” and she accused him of injecting fear tactics.
Several Republican and Trump campaign officials appeared on Sunday news shows to defend the president.
“He wasn’t doing anything, I don’t think, to provoke people to threaten this woman at all. He was having fun at a Trump rally, and, quite frankly, there are bigger issues than this right now for everyday Americans,” Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and a senior campaign adviser, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Michigan Republicans, already struggling in a state that has been returning to its Democratic roots in elections since Trump’s narrow victory in 2016, were again forced to answer for the president’s comments.
“She was literally just targeted,” Lee Chatfield, speaker of the Michigan House and a leading state Republican, said of Whitmer. “Let’s debate differences. Let’s win elections. But not that.”
CLOSING MESSAGE
In the weeks before Election Day, there is now an extraordinary gulf separating Trump’s experience of the campaign from the more sobering political assessments of a number of party officials and operatives, according to interviews with nearly a dozen Republican strategists, White House allies and elected officials.
Among some of Trump’s lieutenants, there is an attitude of grit mixed with resignation: a sense that the best they can do for the final stretch is to keep the president occupied, happy and off Twitter as much as possible, rather than producing a major shift in strategy.
Instead of delivering a focused closing message aimed at changing people’s perceptions about his handling of the coronavirus, or making a case for why he can revive the economy better than Biden can, Trump is spending the remaining days on a mix of personal grievances and attacks on his opponents. He has portrayed himself as a victim, dodged questions about his own coronavirus testing, criticized his attorney general and the FBI director, and equivocated on the benefits of mask-wearing.
Rather than drawing a consistent contrast with Biden on the economy, strategists say, the president’s preference is to criticize Biden’s son Hunter over his business dealings and to hurl personal insults like “Sleepy Joe” against a candidate whose favorability ratings are much higher than Trump’s.
“A lot of Republican consultants are frustrated because we want the president’s campaign to be laser-focused on the economy,” said David Kochel, a Republican strategist in Iowa. “Their best message is: Trump built a great economy” and covid-19 damaged it, and Trump is a better option than Biden to restore it, he said.
“Our base loves the stuff about Hunter Biden, laptops and Mayor [Rudy] Giuliani,” Kochel added. “But they’re already voting for Trump.”
Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, has maintained to senior Republicans that the president has a path forward in the race but at times has conceded it is narrow, sources say.
Stepien and other campaign leaders, including Jason Miller, a senior strategist, have stressed to Republicans in Washington that they expect to outperform the public polls. They say their own data suggests a closer race in a number of states, including Arizona and Pennsylvania, than surveys conducted by news organizations. They are wagering that voter registration and the turnout machinery that Trump’s team has built over the past four years will ultimately give them an edge in narrowly divided states on Election Day.
Information for this article was contributed by Brian Slodysko, Jill Colvin, Will Weissert, Elana Schor and staff members of The Associated Press; and by Maggie Haberman, Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin of The New York Times.