Candidates
Lakefront Airport in Cleveland, he focused on the central message of his campaign: that Trump cost lives by mismanaging America’s response to the worst pandemic in a century.
“Donald Trump is not strong, he’s weak,” Biden declared. “This is apresident who not only doesn’t understand sacrifice, he doesn’t understand courage.”
Trump once led comfortably in Ohio, but Biden said hewas returning to the state at the urging of Sen. Sherrod Brown and other Ohio Democrats in Congress.
Trumpwas spending the final day sprinting through five rallies, fromNorth Carolina toWisconsin. Beyond Ohio, Biden was devoting most of his time to Pennsylvania, where a win would leaveTrumpwith anexceedingly narrow path.
The two men delivered their final messages, with Biden emphasizing the pandemic. He declared that “the first step to beating the virus is beating Donald Trump,” and he promised he would retain the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom the president has talked of firing.
Trump, meanwhile, made onlypassingmentionofwhat his aides believe are his signature accomplishments — the nation’s economic rebound, the recent installation ofSupremeCourt Justice AmyConey Barrett. Instead, he decried the media’s coverage of the campaignwhile saying thathe alsowas being treated unfairly by China, the Electoral College system and rock singer JonBon Jovi.
Biden announced an unusualmove to campaign on Election Day, saying he would head to Philadelphia and his native Scrantontoday as part of a get-outthe-vote effort. His running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, will visit Detroit, a heavily Black city in battleground Michigan, and both of their spouses will hit the road too. Trump, at least for now, was not scheduled to travel today.
More than 93 million votes have already been cast, through early voting or mail-in ballots, which could lead to delays in tabulation. Trump has spent months claiming that the voteswould be ripe for fraud and refusing to guarantee that he would honor the election result.
Trump also rallied in ScrantononMonday, underscoring the importance of the state’s vote-rich northeast counties, and zeroed in on the state’s process to count votes. He has used stark terms to threaten litigation to stop the tabulation of ballots arriving after Election Day — counting that is allowed with earlier postmarks in some states.
He has said that “we’re going in with our lawyers” as soon as the polls close in PennsylvaniaandonMonday spoke ominously about the Supreme Court decision to grant an extension to count the votes after Tuesday.
“They made a very dangerous situation, and Imean dangerous, physically dangerous, and they made it a very, very bad, they did a very bad thing for this state,” Trump declared. He said of Pennsylvania’s DemocraticGov. TomWolf, “Please don’t cheat becausewe’re all watching. We’re all watching you, Governor.”
There is already an appeal pending at the Supreme Court over the counting of absentee ballots in Pennsylvania that are received in the mail in the three days after the election.
The state’s top court ordered the extension, and the Supreme Court refused to block it, though conservative justices expressed interest in taking up the propriety of the three added days after the election. Those ballots are being kept separate in case the litigation goes forward. The issue could assume enormous importance if the late-arriving ballots could tip the outcome.
In addition to Ohio, Biden also has pushed into other formerly reliable Trump strongholds includingGeorgia, where the Democrats’ most popular surrogate, formerPresidentBarackObama, campaigned Monday.
“I didn’t originally plan to come to Georgia. I told Michelle, ‘I’m sorry, Baby, I got to go to Georgia. This is a big deal,’ ” said Obama, noting Democrats’ hopes that they could deliver a knockout blowto Trump in the former GOP stronghold. “Georgia could be the state, Georgia could be the place.”
But even as Biden enjoyed strong poll numbers, the move to expand the map revivedanxietyamongDemocrats scarred by Trump’s 2016 upset over Hillary Clinton, whose forays into red states may have contributed to losing longtime party strongholds. Biden planned a Pittsburgh drive-in event with Lady Gaga onMonday night, reminiscent of Clinton’s rallying with Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi in Philadelphia on the eve of an election shewas favored to win but didn’t.
Short on campaign cash, Trump has been unable to compete with Biden over the airwaves and has relied on rallies to fire up his base. Those events, arguably the most striking political force of the past five years, could drawto a closeMonday with stops in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and two in Michigan. The last was set for Grand Rapids, the city where Trump held hisfinale four years ago.