Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Presidential rivals cross swords, blitz Midwest
Trump upbeat as Biden vows facts
WATERFORD TOWNSHIP, Mich. — President Donald Trump promised to get a weary, fearful nation “back to normal” on Friday and former Vice President Joe Biden pledged to level with America about tough days still ahead after Tuesday’s election.
The 2020 campaign has been largely dominated by the covid-19 pandemic that has killed more than 229,000 Americans and staggered the economy.
Trump and Biden both spent Friday crisscrossing the Midwest, the hardest-hit part of the nation in the latest surge of virus cases. Trump was in Michigan and Biden in Iowa before they both held events in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
With four days until the election and more than 83 million votes already cast, time is running out for
Trump and Biden to change the contours of the race.
Trump, billing himself as an optimist, says the nation has “turned the corner” from the outbreak. He speaks of treatments and potential vaccines. Biden dismisses Trump’s talk as a siren song
that can only prolong the virus, and pledges a focus on reinstituting measures meant to slow the spread of the disease, such as a nationwide mask mandate.
“He said a long dark winter,” Trump said Friday at a rally in Michigan. “Oh that’s great, that’s wonderful. Just what our country needs is a long dark winter and a leader who talks about it.”
Biden, for his part, referred back to Trump’s comments last summer that the virus “is what it is.” He told supporters in Des Moines, Iowa, that “it is what it is because he is who he is! These guys are something else, man.”
Friday marked the beginning of the critical final stretch before the election.
Trump will rally in four Pennsylvania towns today; in Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida on Sunday; and again in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and twice in Michigan on Monday, as well as in Wisconsin, according to a schedule his campaign issued Friday.
Trump trails Biden by about 7.8 points on average in national polls, according to RealClearPolitics, but the race is tighter or in some cases effectively tied in polls of the states Trump is targeting with his final rallies.
“We’re doing a lot of traveling. We’ll be doing a lot of rallies. We have some big ones,” Trump told reporters on Friday before leaving for a three-rally swing in the upper Midwest.
“Biden goes there and he can’t draw flies,” he added. “He can’t draw anybody. Just a few cars, I guess, and they honk their horns. We got the biggest crowds in the history of politics.”
OBAMA ONBOARD
Biden, after visiting Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota on Friday, will hit Michigan today, where he’ll hold a joint rally with former President Barack Obama.
Biden will close out his campaign Monday in a familiar battleground: Pennsylvania, the state where he was born and the one he’s visited more than any other in his campaign. The Biden team announced the candidate, his wife Jill, running mate Sen. Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, plan to “fan out across all four corners of the state.”
After stopping in Green Bay on Friday, Trump will be back in Wisconsin on Monday for a visit to Kenosha.
A new Marquette University Law School poll shows Trump with support from 52% of likely voters in the eight counties that form the half- ring around Milwaukee. In 2016, he received a combined 61% of the vote in the eight counties when he won the state by fewer than 25,000 votes.
Attendance at the president’s later stop in Rochester, Minn., has been capped at 250 people at the insistence of state and local officials.
“We have 25,000 people in Minnesota, which is our last stop today — 25,000 people want to be there. And they say you can only have 250 people,” Trump told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House. “They thought I’d cancel. But I’m not canceling and we’ll find out what happens.”
The Minnesota Department of Health has linked 28 coronavirus cases to other recent Trump campaign events in the state that draw thousands.
Biden aims to hold his election night event in his hometown of Wilmington, Del.
Trump, who had been scheduled to hold a party at his Washington, D.C., hotel, appeared to be rethinking his plans as a result of the city’s covid-19 restrictions.
“So we have a hotel, I don’t know if you’re allowed to use it or not, but I know the mayor has shut down Washington D.C.,” Trump said as he headed out from the White House. “And if that’s the case, we’ll probably stay here or pick another location.”
85 MILLION EARLY VOTES
Early voting continued to soar beyond historical levels throughout the country Friday, with Texas blowing past its total turnout from the 2016 election and nearly a dozen other states closing in on the same milestone.
With four days left until Election Day, more than 9 million people have cast ballots already in Texas, according to the secretary of state’s office. In 2016, the total turnout in Texas was just shy of 9 million.
Nationwide, the number of Americans who have voted early passed 85 million, according to tracking by the nonpartisan U.S. Elections Project, exceeding 60% of the total turnout from the last election. If the trends continue, the country will be on pace to exceed 100 million votes before Tuesday.
“The early returns, driven by mail ballots primarily, are incredible and are aligned with the historic interest in this election,” said Amber McReynolds, a former Denver elections director and head of the nonprofit National Vote At Home Institute. “I believe most ballots by far will be cast before Election Day, with mail ballots making up the majority of votes this year.”
McReynolds added that the largest group of ballots are typically returned in the final five days of the election, meaning the increases were likely to continue through Monday.
As of Friday afternoon, more than 30 million people in all states and territories had voted in- person, and more than 55 million mail ballots had been returned, according to data from the Elections Project, which tracks early voting.
Another 36 million mail ballots remained outstanding, down from roughly 42 million on Wednesday. Election officials say many of those ballots were likely requested by voters who changed their minds and decided to vote in person.
BIG TEXAS TURNOUT
Texans flocked to polling centers when early voting began on Oct. 13, forming long lines that stretched for blocks in some places.
A spate of election-related lawsuits has complicated early voting in the state, with the Texas Supreme Court this week upholding the governor’s authority to limit the number of drop-off locations for absentee ballots to one per county. But counties throughout the state have posted record early-voting turnout.
Statewide, Texas voter turnout has topped 53%. More than 8 million Texans have voted early in-person, and more than 947,000 have voted by mail, data from the secretary of state’s office shows.
The only other state to exceed total turnout from 2016 so far is Hawaii, where 457,000 people have cast ballots so far.
But others could approach that threshold soon. In 10 states — including the battlegrounds of North Carolina, Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Nevada — early voting has surpassed 80% of the total turnout from 2016, data from the states and the Elections Project shows.
In North Carolina more than 4 million people have voted early, nearly 90% of the turnout from the last election.
The advantage for Democrats among those who have already cast ballots continued to narrow in North Carolina and Florida this week. In North Carolina, registered Democrats accounted for 38% of votes cast compared with 32% for Republicans on Friday. By contrast, after the first week of early, in-person voting, the Democratic-Republican share of the vote was 44% to 27%.
The story is starker in Florida, where Democrats held a commanding margin of about 470,000 votes among mail voters at the start of in-person voting on Oct. 19. On Friday morning, that margin had shrunk to roughly 164,000.
TENNESSEE RECORD
And in Tennessee, officials say a record of nearly 2.3 million voters already have cast their ballots, making up just more than half of the state’s registered voters.
The 51% turnout total to date accounts for the full 14-day in-person early-voting period that concluded Thursday and absentee ballots returned during that time frame. Both have surged during the pandemic.
Secretary of State Tre Hargett’s office says turnout from early and absentee voting in Cheatham, Davidson, Loudon, Rutherford, Williamson and Wilson counties has already surpassed total turnout in the 2016 presidential election year.
More than 2.5 million Tennesseans voted in the 2016 general election, including nearly 1.7 million early and absentee votes.
The deadline to request an absentee ballot in Tennessee was Tuesday.
Completed absentee ballots in Tennessee must be received by local election commissions by mail by Election Day’s close of polls. Officials are urging voters to drop off ballots inside the one post office designated in each county by 3 p.m. on Election Day so that county election officials have time to pick up ballots.
Information for this article was contributed by Zeke Miller, Alexandra Jaffe, Kevin Freking, Thomas Beaumont, Will Weissert and Brian Slodysko of The Associated Press; by Derek Hawkins and Amy Gardner of The Washington Post; and by Mario Parker and Jordan Fabian of Bloomberg News.