President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden are spending the last 24 hours before Election Day in a last-minute effort to get out the vote in a presidential contest and an election year like no other in recent memory.
“Show Joe Biden and the Democrat Party what you think of their decades of betrayal and abuse,” Trump told supporters Sunday at a rally north of Detroit. Trump held four rallies in Pennsylvania on Saturday, and the Republican president’s final day has him sprinting through five rallies, from North Carolina to Wisconsin.
Biden held two Sunday afternoon events in Philadelphia after a joint rally with former President Barack Obama in Philadelphia. Biden will close out his campaign where he began it, in Pittsburgh, where he’ll hold a rally Monday night.
On Monday morning, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the president’s Election Night event will be at the White House.
With more than 91 million votes already cast, Trump and Biden are out of time to reshape the race. Instead, they’re focusing on their base and making sure that any potential supporters have either already voted or plan to do so in person Tuesday.
Trump and Biden each painted the other as unfit for office and described the next four years in near-apocalyptic terms if the other were to win.
“The Biden plan will turn America into a prison state locking you down while letting the far-left rioters roam free to loot and burn,” Trump said Sunday at a rally in Iowa, one of the five he held in battleground states.
At a Florida rally, Trump was urged by a campaign crowd to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, as the president’s rift with the nation’s top infectious disease expert widens while the nation sees its most alarming outbreak of the coronavirus since the spring.
Speaking at a campaign rally in Opa-locka, Florida, Trump expressed frustration that the surging cases of the virus that has killed more than 231,000 people in the United States this year remains prominent in the news, sparking chants of “Fire Fauci” from his supporters.
“Don’t tell anybody but let me wait until a little bit after the election,” Trump replied to thousands of supporters early Monday, adding he appreciated their “advice.”
Biden said America was on the verge of putting “an end to a presidency that’s fanned the flames of hate.”
“When America is heard, I believe the message is going to be clear: It’s time for Donald Trump to pack his bags and go home,” Biden said in Philadelphia, the biggest city in a state that could decide the presidency. “We’re done with the chaos, the tweets, the anger, the hate.”
The election caps an extraordinary year that began with Trump’s impeachment, the near collapse of Biden’s candidacy during the crowded Democratic primary and then was fully reshaped by the coronavirus outbreak.
A record number of votes have already been cast, through early voting or mail-in ballots, which could lead to delays in their tabulation. Trump has spent months claiming without evidence that the votes would be ripe for fraud while refusing to guarantee that he would honor the election result.
In the starkest terms yet, Trump on Sunday threatened litigation to stop the tabulation of ballots arriving after Election Day. As soon as polls closed in battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania, Trump said, “we’re going in with our lawyers.”
It was unclear precisely what Trump meant. There is already an appeal pending at the Supreme Court over the counting of absentee ballots in Pennsylvania that are 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. The issue could assume enormous importance if the late-arriving ballots could tip the outcome.
Under the shadow of possible legal battles, Pennsylvania loomed as the most important battleground on the map.
For Biden, who lives in neighboring Delaware, Pennsylvania has long been the focus of his campaign, a bulwark to block Trump from securing the electoral votes needed for reelection. Both he and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, and their spouses will crisscross the state Monday.
But Biden’s other travel telegraphed his campaign’s hope to deliver a knockout blow to Trump that would make any Pennsylvania legal challenges essentially irrelevant.
Biden added a late stop to Ohio, a state where Trump once had a sizable lead and can’t win without. That came on the heels of the ticket’s pushes into other formerly reliable Trump strongholds such as Iowa and Texas, as well as Georgia, where the Democrats' most popular surrogate, Obama, was set to campaign Monday.
But even as Biden enjoyed strong poll numbers, the move to expand the map revived anxiety among Democrats scarred by Trump’s 2016 upset over Hillary Clinton, whose forays into red states may have contributed to losing longtime party strongholds such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Facing a shortage of campaign cash, Trump has been unable to compete with Biden over the airwaves and has relied on rallies to fire up his base and generate media coverage.
The rallies, arguably the most dominant political force of the last five years, could draw to a close Monday with stops in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and two in Michigan. The last will be in Grand Rapids, the same city where Trump held his finale four years ago.
Trump is focusing his last rounds of stops only on states he won four years ago, playing defense in a campaign that has become a referendum on his handling of the pandemic. Both parties say the election holds outsize importance given the confluence of challenges facing the country.
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