AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS
Trump threatens to fight vote count in court, Biden camp ‘fully prepared for hi-jinks’
US President Donaldtrump cast doubt in advance on today’s election results, while Democratic challenger Joe Biden pushed ahead on offence on the final full day of campaigning.
The President threatened legal action to stop vote counting in crucial states including Pennsylvania, where both candidates campaigned yesterday, and his advisers put out a statement accusing Democrats of trying to “subvert state deadlines for receiving and counting ballots”.
If Pennsylvania ballot counting takes several days, as is allowed, Trump charged that “cheating can happen like you have never seen”.
Biden dipped into Ohio, a show of confidence in a state Trump won by 8 percentage points four years ago. He focused on the central message of his campaign: that Trump cost lives by mismanaging the US response to the pandemic.
“Donald Trump is not strong, he’s weak,” Biden declared in Cleveland. “This is a President who not only doesn’t understand sacrifice, he doesn’t understand courage.”
The US is at a crossroads, gripped by the historic pandemic and a reckoning over race. Both campaigns insist they have a pathway to victory, though Biden’s options for picking up the required 270 Electoral College votes are more plentiful. Trump is banking on a surge of enthusiasm from his most loyal supporters — in addition to potential legal manoeuvres.
The twomendelivered their final messages yesterday, with Biden declaring “the first step to beating the virus is beating Donald Trump” and promising he would retain the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, whom the president has talked of firing.
Trump made only passing mention of what his aides believe are his signature accomplishments — an economic rebound, and the recent installation of Supreme Court Justice
Amy Coney Barrett — in favour of a torrent of grievance and combativeness. He angrily decried the media’s coverage of the campaign, complaining he also was being treated unfairly by, in no particular order, China, the Electoral College system and singer Jon Bon Jovi.
Biden said he would head to Philadelphia and his native Scranton on election day as part of a get-out-the-vote effort. His running mate, Kamala Harris, will visit Detroit, a heavily Black city in battleground Michigan.
More than 93 million votes have already been cast, through early voting or mail-in ballots, which could lead to delays in tabulation.
Trump has spent months claiming without evidence that the votes would be ripe for fraud and refusing to guarantee he would honour the election result.
Trump rallied in Scranton yesterday, underscoring the importance of the state’s vote-rich northeast counties, and zeroed in on the state’s process to count votes. He has used stark terms to threaten litigation to stop the tabulation of ballots arriving after Election Day — counting that is allowed with earlier postmarks in some states.
He has said that “we’re going in with our lawyers” as soon as the polls close in Pennsylvania and yesterday spoke ominously about the Supreme Court decision to grant an extension to count the votes after today.
“They made a very dangerous situation, and I mean dangerous, physically dangerous, and they made it a very, very bad, they did a very bad thing for this state,” Trump declared.
There is already an appeal pending at the Supreme Court over the counting of absentee ballots in Pennsylvania received in the mail in the three days after the election.
The state’s top court ordered the extension, and the Supreme Court refused to block it, though conservative justices expressed interest in taking up the propriety of the three added days after the election. Those ballots are being kept separate in case the litigation goes forward. This could assume enormous importance if late-arriving ballots could tip the outcome.
Biden legal advisers Bob Bauer pushed back at Trump. “It’s very telling that President Trump is focused not on his voters but on his lawyers, and his lawyers are not going to win the election for him,” Bauer said.
“We are fully prepared for any legal hijinks of one kind or another. We’re not worried about it.”
Both Biden and Harris — and their spouses — were crisscrossing Pennsylvania yesterday.
Trump once led comfortably in neighbouring Ohio. But Biden said he was returning to the state at the urging of Ohio Democrats in Congress, suggesting a final, late visit could win. Biden also has pushed into other Trump strongholds including Georgia, where former President Barack Obama, campaigned yesterday.
Obama noted Democrats’ hopes of a knockout blow to Trump. “Georgia could be the state, Georgia could be the place.”
But the move to expand the map revived anxiety among Democrats scarred by Trump’s 2016 upset win over Hillary Clinton, whose forays into red states may have contributed to losing longtime party strongholds. — AP