Biden woos Georgia, Trump defends turf
Democratic candidate Joe Biden went on the offensive on Tuesday with rallies in Georgia, hoping to breach the Republican stronghold and expand the battle ground as President Donald Trump played defence, holding rallies in key states that won him the presidency in 2016.
“There aren’t a lot of pundits who would have guessed four years ago that the Democratic candidate for president in 2020 would be campaigning in Georgia one week before Election Day,” Biden told supporters at a drive-in rally in Atlanta, the second of his Georgia rallies. “But we do—because something is happening.”
FiveThirtyEight has Biden ahead of Trump by 1.1 percentage points, in the average of polls in Georgia, but RealClearPolitics has him trailing the president by 0.4 points. It’s a tie, in effect, but in a state that has not voted Democratic in presidential elections since 1992, when Bill Clinton took it in a three-way fight.
The former vice-president believes he has a chance in Georgia, with down-ballot implications for two Senate races. And as a sign of his growing confidence, he plans to also campaign in Iowa, on Friday, just three days before close of polling — Trump won the state by 9.5 percentage points in 2016 but now trails by a thin margin.
Trump held rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin — the two states that won him the presidency in 2016 with Pennsylvania — and Nebraska, a conservative state that comes into play because of its unique system (which it shares only with Maine) of granting electoral college votes by congressional districts, not winner-takes-all.
The rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin came amid a surge in Covid-19 there. The president delivered the same narrative that he has before — he diminished the epidemic claiming it is waning and ridiculed the coverage in the media saying it will be over the day after polling.
It’s all about “Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid …” on television now, he said at a rally in Lansing, Michigan, venting his frustration with the epidemic. Former president Barack Obama, campaigning for Biden in Orlando, Florida, mocked Trump, saying “He’s jealous of Covid’s media coverage.”