Battleground dispatches: 44 days to go
Five swing states hold the keys to victory with 63 electoral votes and close races ahead of election
The path to the presidency runs through about a dozen states that President Donald Trump and Joe Biden are seriously contesting — battlegrounds that will decide who wins the Electoral College. Every Sunday through Election Day, the New York Times will bring you dispatches from the swing states to help explain how voters see the race and the issues that are driving it.
Arizona
Arizona has 11 electoral votes. In 2016, Trump won the state by 3.5 percentage points. In 2020, it is rated Lean Democratic.
At a “Latinos for Trump” event in Phoenix on Monday, Trump read from prepared remarks celebrating Hispanics as an “amazing group of people.”
It was a far cry from when Trump chose the city for his first freewheeling campaign rally in July 2015, finding an exuberant audience for his campaign’s message that Mexican immigrants were dangerous criminals.
Trump’s latest stopover kicked off a flurry of White House visits to the newly minted battleground state — the president, his daughter Ivanka Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and the second lady, Karen Pence, all hosted in-person events in Arizona over the past week.
The full-court press reflects the president’s depressed approval ratings among independents and some Republicans, as well as Arizona’s increasingly Latino electorate.
Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, haven’t set foot in the state, which for the first time in more than two decades appears to be teetering toward a Democratic presidential candidate. A New York Times/Siena College poll published Friday found Trump trailing Biden by 9 percentage points in Arizona; he beat Hillary Clinton by 3.5 points in 2016.
Some Democrats worry that Biden could be committing a tactical error if he doesn’t host at least one in-person event in Arizona.
Bryan Rasmussen, chairman of the Democratic Party in Yuma County, which stretches along the U.S.-Mexico border in western Arizona, and which Trump has visited twice this year, said retail politics were still important.
“We are absolutely still pushing for Joe Biden to visit us here in Arizona and Yuma County. You’ve got to be out there and be present,” Rasmussen said, adding that he believes the Democrat will make an appearance in Arizona before Election Day. “That would do a lot to make people here feel heard and seen and valued.”
Michigan
Michigan has 16 electoral votes. In 2016, Trump won the state by 0.2 percentage points. In 2020, it is rated Lean Democratic.
As local clerks across Michigan prepare to begin sending out millions of absentee ballots on Thursday, Tina Barton, the clerk of Rochester Hills, a Detroit suburb, doesn’t have much time to worry about the conspiracy theories about voting that are floating around social media.
The latest false claim, she said, is that the Postal Service can check a ballot’s mailing label to see if it came from a Republican or a Democrat — even though Michigan voters do not register by party.
“It’s exhausting to try and combat the misinformation every day,” Barton said.
The clerks also have more substantial problems to deal with as they prepare for the general election, such as
processing an expected record number of absentee ballots. More than 2.2 million Michigan voters have already requested them.
The Michigan Senate last week took a small step toward providing some relief, approving a bill that would allow clerks to begin processing mail ballots for 10 hours on the day before the election.
Under the new rule, election workers could open the outside envelope but not remove the ballot from the secrecy sleeve inside to prepare it to be fed through voting tabulators. That can’t begin until 7 a.m. on Election Day, Nov. 3.
Nevada
Nevada has six electoral votes. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the state by 2.4 percentage points. In 2020, it is rated Lean Democratic.
As she grabbed a bleach wipe to clean her shopping cart before entering La Bonita supermarket, Raquel Gomez, 32, paused briefly as she considered what the most important issue was in the presidential election.
“Well, of course,” she said, as if the question were absurd. “The pandemic. We have to get back to normal.”
Gomez has spent the last several weeks juggling her school-age children’s online learning with her shifts at a nearby Italian restaurant, which had been closed for months. There is nothing normal for her right now.
The next night, Richard Fuller, 51, joined a group of friends heading to the first indoor rally for Trump since June. Though the event violated state regulations banning gatherings of more than 50 people, Fuller was not concerned about his health or safety.
He has been out to dinner at some local casinos, and he accuses the news media of stoking fear of the coronavirus. He does not know anyone who has become seriously ill. From his point of view, the only thing stopping a return to normal is a misplaced panic.
“We’ve got to get over this,” he said.
When Trump took to the stage, cameras showed a few people behind him wearing masks. But the vast majority of attendees had left the disposable masks they were offered behind.
Back at La Bonita market, Noel Vazquez, 21, said he had never registered to vote, unsure of how much politics really mattered. But when a young woman approached him asking him to do so, he did not hesitate. After his father lost his job this spring, Vazquez had been using his paycheck from a local warehouse to help his parents pay rent. And all around him, he saw reasons to be scared of the future.
“I never took it seriously until now,” he said, adding that he expected to vote for Biden. “I just want to feel safe.”
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania has 20 electoral votes. In 2016, Trump won the state by 0.7 percentage points. In 2020, it is rated Lean Democratic.
Trump may be a shoo-in to win deep-red Lebanon County, Pa., where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats 2 to 1. But that hasn’t stopped some lifelong Republicans there from supporting Biden in response to what they see as the president’s divisive and damaging conduct.
Trump has failed to unite the country, said Tom Carmany, a retired physician and registered Republican from Annville, about 75 miles northwest of Philadelphia. “All I see is division, and I see chaos, hate, violence, inflammatory rhetoric, there’s stuff on Twitter all the time,” said Carmany, 83, who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. “It’s like dealing with a teenager.”
There has been no sign that the president’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has cost him support in the county, said Dan
MacLean, 71, a retired physician and former Republican. “Any economic anger is directed against the Democratic governor for what people see as heavyhanded business restrictions.”
Republicans say Trump appears to be running even more strongly in the county this year than in 2016, when he won more than twice as many votes as Clinton. Republican voter registrations increased by 1,335 from June 1 to Sept. 15, well ahead of 282 for the Democrats and 394 for other parties.
“People are feeling a little more enthusiasm this time,” said Linda Jackson, 60, a Republican who voted for Trump in 2016 and said she would do so again.
Jackson, who works as a fundraiser for a nonprofit, defended Trump’s management of the pandemic. “The president in my opinion thinks outside the box, and he enlisted public-private partnerships to get the equipment, the ventilators, the PPE, all the things that we needed on the local level, to combat the virus,” Jackson said. “And he’s really ramped up this testing for a vaccine. I think he’s done a really good job.”
While Democrats have no expectations that Biden will win the county, they are working to turn out support.
“We will not win the county, but if we win the city and close the margins in the suburbs, it will help overall in Pennsylvania, so that’s our goal,” said Marilyn Boogaard, founder of Central Pennsylvania United for Biden, a voter registration group.
Wisconsin
Wisconsin has 10 electoral votes. In 2016, Trump won the state by 0.8 percentage points. In 2020, it is rated Lean Democratic.
James Sands was loading his pickup with flooring planks on Monday outside a Home Depot in Janesville, across the street from a Holiday Inn where Vice President Mike Pence had paid a campaign visit hours earlier.
This year’s presidential race seems “more like a TV show than real life,” Sands said, taking a break to reflect on a most unusual election season. “I think people, more and more, are becoming disillusioned about the whole political process,” he added.
Some voters agreed, but for different reasons.
“I’m conservative, but I don’t like a lot of Republicans,” said Jarrod Morris, 51, of Janesville, who described himself as a Trump supporter. “Few have my ideology. They’re weak and Republican in name only.”
Chris Hionis, 45, of nearby Evansville, said the Republican Party had become “too elitist.” He now supports Biden.
“The rampant murder of people of color doesn’t seem to be getting addressed by conservatives the way I thought they would,” Hionis said. “I can’t call myself the conservative I used to be.”