Virus colors campaign in final days
LUMBERTON, N.C. – President Donald Trump assured supporters packed shoulder to shoulder Saturday that “we’re rounding the turn” and mocked challenger Joe Biden for raising alarms about the pandemic. Meanwhile, Biden bemoaned to a smaller gathering the need to campaign at a distance but said he understood the public health reasons behind it.
With coronavirus infections setting records just as the election heads into the home stretch, Trump and Biden took starkly different approaches to the public health crisis in appealing for votes in battleground states.
“We don’t want to become superspreaders,” Biden told supporters at a “drive-in” rally Saturday in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, picking up a term that has been used to describe the Rose Garden event in late September in which Trump announced his Supreme Court nominee. More than two dozen people linked to the White House have contracted COVID-19 since that gathering.
In Lumberton, North Carolina, his tongue firmly in cheek, Trump called Biden “an inspiring guy” for raising alarm about the pandemic. The president said he watched Biden’s Bucks County rally as he flew to North Carolina and sarcastically observed that it appeared attendees, who were in their cars, weren’t properly socially distancing.
“You know why we have cases?” Trump said. “’Cause we test so much. And in many ways, it’s good. And in many ways, it’s foolish. In many ways, OK? In many ways, it’s very foolish.”
Trump continued to criticize Biden for saying during Thursday’s debate that the country was headed for a “dark winter” because of the pandemic – the scenario of a surge in infections that health experts warned about for months. More than 83,000 infections were reported on Friday alone, a record.
“We’re rounding the turn … our numbers are incredible,” Trump said.
Biden, in an interview with Pod Save America aired Saturday, said his first priority is to “get control of the virus” because the economy can’t move forward without stemming the disease.
“As I said before, I will shut down the virus, not the economy,” Biden said in Bucks County.
Trump, who spent Friday night at his Mar-a-lago resort after campaigning in
Florida, visited an early voting polling site set up at a public library to cast his own ballot Saturday morning. The president last year switched his official residence from New York to his private Florida club, complaining that New York politicians had treated him badly.
Greeted at the polling site by a crowd of cheering supporters, Trump opted to vote in person rather than mail in his ballot. He wore a mask inside, following local rules to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. He later said that he voted for “a guy named Trump” and that a poll worker asked him for identification. The president said he used his passport.
Biden hasn’t voted but is likely do so
in person on Election Day, Nov. 3, as Delaware doesn’t offer early voting.
Biden hosted another rally later Saturday in Luzerne County, a blue-collar area that twice voted for Barack Obama but went overwhelmingly for Trump four years ago.
Biden’s was joined by rock star Jon Bon Jovi, a native of neighboring New Jersey who as a child spent summers with grandparents in Erie, Pennsylvania. Bon Jovi performed three songs at the Luzerne event.
More than 54 million votes have already been cast, with an additional 100 million or so expected before a winner is declared.