Trump, Biden urge backers in Florida to get to the polls
TAMPA, Fla. — Campaigning hours apart in Florida, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday both urged supporters to get to polling places in person, even as a tropical storm interrupted early voting in the Southeast.
The shift to focusing on in-person voting Tuesday — or sooner, where possible — comes as more than 80 million Americans have already cast their ballots. While the Election Day vote traditionally favors Republicans and early votes tend toward Democrats, the pandemic has injected new uncertainty.
“You hold the power. If Florida goes blue, it’s over,” Biden told supporters Thursday.
Trump on Thursday was celebrating a new federal estimate that the economy grew at a 33.1% annual rate in the July-September quarter — by far the largest quarterly gain on record — making up ground from its plunge in the spring, when the spread of
the coronavirus closed businesses and threw tens of millions of people out of work.
“So glad this great GDP number came out before November 3rd,” Trump tweeted, predicting a dire reversal if Biden is elected.
Economists warned that the economy is already weakening again and facing renewed threats as confirmed viral cases have surged, hiring has slowed and federal stimulus help has mostly run out.
Biden said, “The recovery is slowing if not stalling, and the recovery that is happening is helping those at the top, but leaving tens of millions of working families and small businesses behind.”
The Democrat is framing his closing arguments to voters on what he describes as responsible management of the covid-19 pandemic. Trump is arguing that Biden would undo the economic gains of his administration with stricter, virus-targeting public health controls — though those are largely what scientists are calling for.
“The people are tired. They can’t do it anymore,” Trump said of lockdowns.
Trump and Biden both visited the western end of Florida’s Interstate 4 corridor, an area known for rapid residential growth, sprawling suburbs and its status as an ever-changing, hard-fought battleground in presidential elections.
The president had been scheduled to hit another Sun Belt battleground state, North Carolina, on Thursday evening but canceled his event in Fayetteville as Tropical Storm Zeta carried wind gusts reaching 50 mph to the area.
Today, Trump is to visit three upper Midwest states, and he will hold a trio of rallies Saturday in Pennsylvania before launching a whirlwind tour of battlegrounds including Florida, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania in the closing 48 hours of the race.
Biden, meanwhile, heads later in the week to three more states Trump won in 2016: Iowa, Wisconsin and then Michigan, where he’ll hold a rally with former President Barack Obama on Saturday. Biden’s campaign also announced he will visit Minnesota today, hours before Trump holds a rally in one of the states that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 but which the president is hoping to pick up this year.
The pandemic’s consequences are escalating, with deaths climbing in 39 states and an average of 805 people dying daily nationwide — up from 714 two weeks ago. The sharp rise sent shockwaves through financial markets, causing the Dow Jones Industrial Average to drop steeply Wednesday, though stock prices recovered somewhat Thursday.
Trump is betting on the GOP’s vast field and data operations, and efforts known as “poll flushing” — monitoring precinct lists for who has and has not yet voted — to provide a late boost on Election Day. The Republican National Committee, which has more than 3,000 field staff members and claims more than 2.5 million volunteers, will use that information to reach out to Trump supporters to ensure they get to the polls.
AD SPENDING
On Thursday, Trump was introduced in Tampa by first lady Melania Trump, who praised her husband’s presidency, saying that “under Donald’s leadership, we have blocked out the noise and focused on you, the American people.”
Trump is banking on local news coverage of his visit to overcome a substantial advertising deficit stemming from a late cash crunch. Biden and his allies are outspending Trump and his backers by more than 3-to-1 in Florida — about $23 million to about $7 million — in the final push to Election Day, according to data from ad tracking firm Kantar/CMAG.
Biden is pouring tens of millions of dollars into a torrent of online advertising that will deliver his closing message of the presidential campaign, highlighting his promise to govern for all Americans while blasting Trump’s handling of the pandemic.
“I will work as hard for those who don’t support me as those who do,” Biden says in one of the digital ads, which took over the masthead of YouTube.com on Thursday. “That’s the job of a president — the duty to care for everyone.”
Just how much Biden will spend is unclear. His campaign says it is putting a “mid-eight figure” dollar amount behind more than 100 different ads, which means it could be spending as little as $25 million — but potentially much more.
The ads will run on social media platforms including Instagram and Facebook, streaming services such as Hulu, and music applications such as Pandora.
The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, launched its closing message to voters Thursday, not mentioning Trump, in an apparent aim to help GOP candidates up and down the ballot with a focus on traditional Republican messages around health care and lowering taxes.
FLORIDA VOTING
As of Wednesday morning, in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, 53,000 more Democrats than Republicans had voted by mail. In Pinellas, the largest of the four counties in the state to switch from Obama to Trump in 2016, that number was just shy of 30,000.
Republicans in both counties have a slight edge in the state’s in-person early voting, which began last Saturday. Trump himself voted in Palm Beach County downstate.
Democrats are pressing their backers who have yet to return ballots to head to the polls in person.
The aftereffects of Zeta were holding back voters at a number of polling places in northern Florida and northern Georgia that lost power. In Douglas County, in Atlanta’s western suburbs, all six polling locations were without power, as were county offices.
The coronavirus is also a concern for voters who may test positive ahead of Tuesday’s election.
Some voters will be required to get doctor’s notes or enlist family members to help. Others, in isolation, will need to have a witness present while they vote.
Sudden illness is an impediment to voting every election year, typically for a small number of Americans. Many provisions to help those voters apply exclusively to people who are hospitalized.
In many states, deadlines for requesting absentee ballots are fast approaching or have already passed, and the limited time remaining poses logistical challenges that multiply as Election Day nears.
“We’re very concerned about it,” said Julie Houk, an attorney for the nonpartisan Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “People who are isolating and being careful to protect public health should not be penalized in this election for doing what medical experts are saying they should do.”
POLL WORKERS
In Wisconsin, about 400 National Guard troops will be activated to make up for any shortages at polling stations on Election Day, Gov. Tony Evers announced Thursday.
There is currently a shortage of about 200 poll workers out of the roughly 30,000 who will be staffing the polls Tuesday, said Wisconsin Elections Commission leader Meagan Wolfe. She said that small of a gap was “fantastic news” and reflects the hard work of local officials to solicit volunteers and backups.
“We don’t have these reports of large, known shortages right now,” Wolfe said. She said she also hadn’t heard any reports of any local election leaders becoming sick with covid-19 and being unable to staff the polls on Election Day.
Guard troops will be kept on reserve and called upon to fill shortages as needed, she said. They will work in their local communities and will not be in uniform, she said.
In Minnesota, a threejudge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Thursday that state absentee ballots that arrive after Election Day should be separated from other ballots in case they are later invalidated by a court.
The ruling doesn’t block Minnesota’s seven-day extension for counting absentee ballots outright — but it does order a lower court to issue a ruling to segregate the ballots so they can be “removed from vote totals in the event a final order is entered” that finds them unlawful.
The ruling is a win for Republicans, who argued that the extension — which had been approved in both state and federal courts because of the pandemic — violated federal law that establishes Nov. 3 as the date of the 2020 election.
BORDER WALL
Separately, top Trump administration officials visited Texas on Thursday to announce they have nearly completed 400 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
In the Rio Grande Valley, where acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and other officials spoke Thursday, authorities have added just 7 miles to sections of stop-and-start fencing. That’s despite the region long being the busiest corridor for unauthorized crossings.
Wolf criticized Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, judges who have ruled against the wall and what he labeled “outright lies in the press.”
Mark Morgan, acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, claimed that he was locked out of his Twitter account for posting support for the wall and said rolling back Trump’s immigration programs would lead to an “invasion” of migrants.
“The wall system we’re looking at right now, it works,” Morgan said.
Border Patrol Deputy Chief Raul Ortiz said this week that the agency was not pushing to build quickly this year in case Trump loses to Biden, who has pledged to freeze any border wall construction if he wins.
“For us, regardless of who’s sitting in the White House, I think giving the agents the tools and the resources are going to be awfully important,” Ortiz said. “This infrastructure is important to us doing everything we can to control that border.”
In Wisconsin, about 400 National Guard troops will be activated to make up for any shortages at polling stations on Election Day, Gov. Tony Evers announced Thursday.
Information for this article was contributed by Zeke Miller, Alexandra Jaffe, Aamer Madhani, Nomaan Merchant, Amy Forliti, Tamara Lush, Michelle Price, Kathleen Ronayne, Will Weissert and Brian Slodysko of The Associated Press; and by Neena Satija and Emma Brown of The Washington Post.