Trump, Biden make their final appeals
PHILADELPHIA — President Donald Trump unleashed a litany of bitter grievances — including complaints about polls that suggest he may lose Tuesday’s election — while Joe Biden vowed “an end to a presidency that’s divided this nation,” as the two rivals made impassioned pleas to voters Monday in a whirl of last-minute rallies.
Trump spent the final campaign day in a grueling marathon of five rallies, but they were all in states he won in 2016. Biden held his three final events in Ohio and Pennsylvania, battleground states he hopes will return to the Democratic column and blunt any late Trump surge.
The two campaigns also deployed their running mates, spouses and other surrogates, including former President Barack Obama and Lady Gaga for Biden, in an effort to prod or convince the shrinking number of voters still left after weeks of early voting and a record-breaking onslaught of advertising.
As it has been all year, the two campaigns could not be more different as the final day of voting approached.
Speaking at small, carefully socially distanced rallies in Cleveland and near Pittsburgh, Biden hammered Trump on his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, staying on script and banking that voters will see his sober approach as a return to normalcy after four years of tumult under Trump.
At his first three rallies — in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in Avoca, Pennsylvania, and Traverse City, Michigan — the president repeatedly veered off his scripted remarks, which focused on a promise to recreate the “economic powerhouse” that was wrecked by the pandemic.
Trump instead attacked familiar targets, including his impeachment by the House and subsequent acquittal in the Senate, his 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton and her emails, Silicon Valley companies that he claims have stifled bad news about Biden, the special counsel investigation into his 2016 campaign’s involvement with Russia, China and the coronavirus that emerged
there, Democratic-leaning celebrities including Lebron James, adverse rulings by the Supreme Court, and even the polling arm of Fox News, which shows him trailing Biden nationally and in multiple swing states.
But as he has since taking office, he returned again and again to his frustration with the media, blaming journalists for his myriad problems and pointing to the television cameras and reporters corralled in a so-called press pen in front of him.
“We’ve been under a phony fake hoax investigation for three years, nothing but really bad and corrupt publicity from these people,” he said in Fayetteville, standing in front of Air Force One on the runway.
“I wonder what it would have been if all of the nonsense wasn’t brought up,” he said, sounding rueful.
Unlike the closing days of the 2016 campaign, when Trump hewed to a populist script and balanced his grievances with firm economic promises, his lack of focus has dominated this year, an unusual strategy for a candidate facing daunting odds on the eve of a presidential election.
The president is not only trailing Biden in many national polls. He is also facing deficits in each of the battleground states where he campaigned Monday: North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. He won all four in 2016.
The gap is even narrowing in Texas, long a Republican stronghold, where polls give Trump only a narrow lead and a flood of early voting has broken records.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, appointed by President George W. Bush, dismissed a Republican challenge to drive-thru voting in Harris County, the state’s largest, which surrounds Houston, clearing the way for 127,000 early votes to be counted.
The judge’s ruling follows two related decisions by the Texas Supreme Court rejecting Republican efforts to disallow the votes, and appeared to clear the way for the drivethru votes to be counted Tuesday. The Republican plaintiffs plan to appeal.
Biden’s visit to Cleveland marked a gamble by his campaign. Trump won Ohio by 8 percentage points in 2016, but Democratic strategists see an opening for Biden to potentially expand his electoral margin.
Like much of the country, Ohio has seen a surge of coronavirus infections and hospitalizations in recent weeks, and Biden blamed Trump for failing to contain the contagion — or even trying to.
“I’m never going to raise the white flag of surrender. We’re going to beat this virus. We’re going to get it under control, I promise you,” Biden bellowed in an airport hangar in Cleveland.
Biden pointed out his four grandchildren in the crowd — “they’re my good luck charms” — before lacing into Trump for suggesting that doctors were inflating COVID-19 deaths so they could make more money, calling Trump a “disgrace.”
As for Trump’s musing at a rally Sunday night that he might fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, after the election, Biden sarcastically called the plan “wonderful.”
“I’ve got a better idea: Elect me and we’re gonna hire Dr. Fauci. And we’re gonna fire Donald Trump!” Biden said.