Campaigns seek to energize voters

In the final stretch before Election Day, both campaigns were focused on Michigan and Pennsylvania, states that President Donald Trump won narrowly four years ago.

DEMOCRATS

Calling Joe Biden his “brother,” Barack Obama on Saturday accused Trump of failing to take the coronavirus pandemic and the presidency seriously as Democrats leaned on America’s first Black president to energize Black voters in battleground Michigan on the final weekend of the 2020 campaign.

Obama, the 44th president, and Biden, his vice president who wants to be the 46th, held drive-in rallies in Flint and Detroit, predominantly Black cities where strong turnout will be essential to swing the longtime Democratic state to Biden’s column after Trump won it in 2016.

The memories of Trump’s win in Michigan and the rest of the Upper Midwest are still searing in theminds of many Democrats during this closing stretch before Tuesday’s election. That leaves Biden in the position of holding a consistent lead in the national polls and an advantage in most battlegrounds, including Michigan, yet still facing anxiety it could all slip away.

Obama said he initially hoped “for the country’s sake” that Trump “might take the job seriously. He never has.”

The former president, addressing voters in dozens of cars in a Flint high school parking lot, seized on Trump’s continued focus on the size of his campaign crowds.

“Did no one come to his birthday party when he was a kid? Was he traumatized?” Obama mocked. “The country’s going through a pandemic. That’s not what you’re supposed to be worrying about.”

REPUBLICANS

Trump made an aggressive play for pivotal Pennsylvania, focusing largely on his white, working-class base. His first of four scheduled stops in Pennsylvania was in a small town in Bucks County on the eastern edge of the state.

Repeating what has become a consistent part of his closing message, Trump raised baseless concerns about election fraud, pointing specifically at Philadelphia, a city whose large African American population is key to Biden’s fate in the state.

“They say youhave tobe very, very careful — what happens in Philadelphia,” Trump charged. “Everybody has to watch.”

The president also railed against a recent Supreme Court ruling that will allow Pennsylvania to count mail ballots received as many as three days after polls close. He predicted “bedlam” and “many bad things” as the nation waits for a result.

Several studies, including one commissioned by Trump himself, have failed to uncover any significant examples of election fraud. Good-government advocacy groups are concerned that the president’s repeated calls for his supporters to monitor the polls may lead to widespread voter intimidation.

Republicans are betting that Trump can win a second term by driving up turnout among his strongest supporters — white, non-college-educated men and rural voters — while limiting Biden’s advantage with Blacks and Latinos.

Trump isn’t ceding Michigan to Biden. He visited Waterford Township, near Detroit, on Friday and held a rally in the state capital, Lansing, last week.