As contest enters key phase, rivals devise strategies
A presidential campaign long muffled by the coronavirus pandemic will burst into a newly intense and public phase after Labor Day, as Joe Biden moves aggressively to defend his polling lead against a ferocious onslaught by President Trump directed chiefly at white voters in the Midwest.
Private polls conducted for both parties during and after their August conventions found the race largely stable but tightening slightly in some states, with Trump recovering some support from conservativeleaning rural voters who had drifted away over the summer amid the worsening pandemic. Yet Biden continues to enjoy advantages with nearly every other group, especially in populous areas where the virus remains at the forefront for voters, according to people briefed on the data.
No president has entered Labor Day weekend — the traditional kickoff of the fall campaign — as such a clear underdog since George H.W. Bush in 1992. Trump has not led in public polls in such mustwin states as Florida since Biden claimed the nomination in April, and there has been little fluctuation in the race. Still, the president’s surprise win in 2016 weighs heavily in the thinking of nervous Democrats and hopeful Republicans alike.
Trump’s effort to revive his candidacy by blaming Biden’s party for scenes of looting and arson in American cities has jolted Biden into a more proactive posture, one that some Democrats have long urged him to adopt. The former vice president spent last week pushing back forcefully on
Trump’s often false attacks, after encouragement from allies including former Secretary of State John Kerry, whose 2004 presidential campaign faltered in the face of a concerted smear campaign about his Vietnam War service.
Both parties see Trump with a narrow path to reelection that runs through heavily white states like Wisconsin and Minnesota, where his strategy of racial division could help him catch Biden. Yet the president is also on defense in diverse southern and western states he carried in 2016, including Florida, North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia.
Biden is slated to visit Pennsylvania on Monday and Michigan on Wednesday, his third and fourth trips to critical swing states since last week, when he traveled to Pittsburgh for a speech rebutting Trump’s attacks and then to Kenosha, Wis., to meet with the family of Jacob Blake, a Black man shot by police, and with others.
Trump’s campaign advisers maintain that their private surveys are more encouraging than public polling. But while Trump’s swerve toward a strident lawandorder message has helped him consolidate conservative support, his rhetoric about rioting in a handful of cities does not appear to have swayed moderates, strategists in both parties said.